


black bones gone all blue

by requiodile



Series: tortuous, a shell [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Character Death, Child Death, Depression, Disembowelment, Dismemberment, Existential Angst, Fratricide, Gruesome Imagery, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, Major Original Character(s), Medical Experimentation, Mutilation, Original Character Death(s), Posthuman Themes, Psychological Horror, Splattergore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-04-15 08:23:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 49,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4599717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/requiodile/pseuds/requiodile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier is a ghost. That much is true. Despite several <em>confirmed</em> eliminations of the Soldier by international security organizations and various government forces, the myth keeps reappearing despite bodily evidence to the contrary. This is the way it has been for decades.</p><p>Or: </p><p>An AU where the Bucky that Steve meets and fights on the helicarrier is a cybernetic clone of Bucky, not the original. It quickly becomes apparent that more than one clone exists.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dianmz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dianmz/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If it weren't for _[this art](http://dianmz.tumblr.com/post/97402456862/in-another-world/)_ , this fic wouldn't exist. 
> 
> This story is primarily from Steve's point of view; I know it says kidfic right in the tags, but this is less of a kidfic and more about Steve's emotional and psychological hurdles--about his struggles with depression and PTSD and residual traumas from everything that he's been repressing his whole life. That, and posthumanism, and the discussion of what it means to be human; of personal agency and victimhood and regret. Click on the series for more in-depth summary notes. 
> 
> But this chapter is 500% gore and Steve suffering. It is a lot of gore, and a lot of suffering. Stay tuned!

There were four files lying on the table.

They were printed scans of folders that Fury’s contacts had managed to salvage from Hydra’s mass destruction of their own files during the expulsion and imprisonment of Hydra officials hidden in international organizations. Two were originally in the possession of the MI6, while one belonged to a private military contractor based out of South Africa; the last was a joint Korean-American report of an incident that had involved the sabotage of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. 

All were in English, and the photographic evidence makes Steve’s head spin itself into rags. The South Africans had sold the body off to the highest black market bidder—Steve glances at a nearby wall, pinned with papers and connections. Hydra had reclaimed the mechanical components, but the rest had been discreetly purchased by the Chinese government. MI6 kept their bodies in deep-freeze, and of the intruder at the DMZ, there was nothing left but a few pieces of bone, fabric, and metal locked away in a little tin box somewhere in the South Korean American embassy.

There’s no mistaking the faces, at least in the pictures which showed what remained of them. A footnote in the former MI6 file states that the assassin—young, estimated to be barely twenty years of age—resisted interrogation procedures, and committed suicide via a remote mechanism. They’d managed to keep him alive long enough to extract his name; he had called himself Beta-11. This section of the file was dated back to 1972.

It’s the “11” that claws at the back of Steve’s heart like a starving dog at a fresh grave. 11, 11. Did ten separate individuals come before? How many came after? How many were currently _active?_

He doesn’t hear Sharon come into the FBI forensics morgue, not until she gently rearranges a bloodied scissor on the autopsy tray behind him. He doesn’t turn around.

When he speaks, he’s not startled by the sound of his own voice so much as it’s if he nearly thinks someone else has taken possession of his throat; as if he’s parting his lips and moving his tongue independently of words that seem as if they’re coming from a place that’s further away than just his own body. “It wasn’t. It wasn’t quick. How exactly did he die?”

There’s a rustle—Sharon’s looking at the state of progress made by the team of forensic technicians on their in-depth secondary autopsy. It’s very cold in the room. Steve doesn’t think he has the strength to shiver. “A failure of an internal mechanism in the arm. There was something irregular with the coagulation of his blood outwards from a particular point of origin, suggesting that some kind of toxin was released in one large burst that dwindled off as reserves were depleted.”

“And this was—this poisoning was caused by the sniper’s bullet?”

“Partially,” she replies. “You were there, you saw. The shot entered behind his right shoulder at an oblique angle, going through his heart and striking a trigger device installed into the lower left side of his ribcage. _That_ was what prompted the toxin release from the arm, disregarding the simultaneous heart failure—we’re still trying to figure out the composition. Your report states that he remained standing for a nearly a minute, but the shock rendered him unable to speak before convulsions caused his collapse.”

Steve turns. Fortunately, the body is covered in a sheet; unfortunately, the vague suggestion of the corpse’s profile through the cloth is enough to make vomit tease at the base of Steve’s tongue. “The only way,” he grits, uneven and buckling, “The only way that someone could have hit that internal switch from eight hundred meters is if they already knew it was there. He was a moving target—he was running away from me in the middle of rush hour. Either the sniper was one of the people who put it there themselves, or if.”

He still can’t quite wrap his mind around it, around _this_. The possibility that any of it is real, even though he ought to know better by now about things that can’t be true. This just seems like another bad, bad joke, but that’s the thing with bad jokes; they’re not actually jokes.

He can’t wrap his mind around anything. “Or, or if the sniper had one, himself. The same kind of failsafe—the same kind of training.” The same face.

“Yes, that’s what we think.” Sharon’s gaze switches from Steve, down to the shine of the metal thumb sticking out from under the edge of the sheet. She tucks back the sheet with care to expose the entire limb, illuminating the straight line of the corpse’s nose and strong, sweet brow as the fabric rucks up everywhere else. Steve, leaning back against the table with the files, crushes the corner of the stainless steel structure with a hand. 

“I’m limited in my ability to help you, now that SHIELD’s gone; but I’ll try give you as many leads from here as I can, as a CIA liaison with some leeway due to my peripheral experience with both you and the situation this past April.” She shrugs carelessly, but her voice is far kinder. “It’s not much. If I can get myself reassigned to the FBI, I might be of more use to you than just the bureaucratic standby I’ve been reduced to. At least with the CIA, I can get out of the country that much easier; but that puts me out of the country and mostly ineffectual if you find yourself remaining here in need of my help.””

Sharon pulls on sterile gloves and lifts the arm until the inner join of the elbow is exposed. “For the entire time you’ve been in here, you haven’t looked once at the details of the autopsy, or at the body.” She cradles the metal in her hands; it’s formed such that Sharon’s fingers wrap around the curves of that artificial flesh below the shoulder and at the wrist with ease, as if the plating itself was nothing but a glove over the real thing beneath. 

“You don’t have much time left to be alone, and I was getting worried that you wouldn’t actually, well. I figured that you wanted to see this for yourself,” she says. “The initial autopsy report generated states that a designation of some kind was found hidden in the plating—ah, here it is.”

With his enhanced vision, Steve can read the letters and numbers from where he stands, but steps forward anyway. _Beta-24_ , the engraving says, in a precise, engineered font. It’s in Greek—a lowercase _β-dash-2-4_ , but Steve has at least remembered some of the mathematics that he’d have to catch up on whenever he’d missed a week or two of school from yet another routine illness. He’d be sitting up in bed with a handkerchief over his mouth, being drilled on common algebraic variables by his best friend in the whole world. Tau, phi, rho, zeta, lambda—beta. But that was a long time ago.

The designation only visible when the arm is fully extended; otherwise, the plates cleverly overlap and obscure it. Steve goes very still. Twenty-four is a far larger number than eleven.

“Biological age is estimated to be about twenty-nine, thirty. Nearly his entire torso is reworked biosynthetic material—the technician was at a total loss as to how fluid the integration was with the subject’s actual flesh. Working thesis is that some of this has been installed and the rest has been symbiotically grown.”

“Grown?” That doesn’t make sense. You can’t _grow_ metal. It must show on his face, because Sharon exhales, apologetically.

“That’s what the report says.” Strands of her hair have slipped out from her bun, and for a moment, she looks as wretched as Steve feels. “Honestly, all of this. It’s unbelievable. There’s not much more I can tell you, since we’ve got several teams working day and night right now trying to figure out the puzzle of how this body can _exist_ and nothing else. You’re Captain America. That’s enough to earn you an hour of alone time, but we’re almost up and the technicians have to get back in and continue working.”

Steve’s not sure why his hands aren’t shaking more. They aren’t shaking at all. He reaches out, and uncovers Beta-24’s face, _Bucky’s_ face. 

And it is, it _is_ Bucky’s face. Beta-24 had spoken with Bucky’s voice, looked at him with Bucky’s wide, anguished eyes on the helicarrier. Beta-24 had saved him from the water and fled and when Steve had finally caught up months later in Beirut, Beta-24 had only managed to gasp, “Please, please, just go—“ before a shot rang out and Steve had thought he’d lost Bucky forever, _again_.

Turns out, there had been at least twenty-four men out there with Bucky’s face, bleeding with Bucky’s blood and killing with Bucky’s hands. Sharon lays a hand on Steve’s arm; she’s removed her gloves. “I’m sorry, Steve.”

She’s about to say more, but Steve nods in the affirmative before the silence departs. “I’ve got five, I know. I’ll be out in a moment.” He swivels to face her as she starts turning to leave, shuddering with his whole body. “I—Sharon, thank you. The rest, I can do on my own.”

“I think they’d deign to argue otherwise,” Sharon murmurs, canting her head towards the observation windows along one entire wall. Through the reinforced glass, the sunset and oak of Natasha and Sam frame either side of Steve’s view. “You might think you’re alone. In some ways, you are, but not in all. So long as you _remember_ , you’ll never be truly by yourself.”

Steve lets her go, his heart thick and dry against his lungs. She leaves in a faint cloud of pine and graphite.

He has four minutes left; these, he gives to Beta-24. “I was too late,” Steve whispers. His throat closes up and he can’t say the rest. _What would I have done if I had saved you? If you hadn’t been shot? Where would you go? Who would you be, if not Bucky?_

There’s nothing more that Steve wants than to touch Beta-24’s face and find out if the skin of his face feels like how Steve remembers the skin of Bucky’s face felt. It had felt like skin, when they had been grappling all those months ago. But to touch him here would be contaminating the evidence and potentially influencing the results of all the testing that the body has yet to undergo. Technically, Steve shouldn’t even be breathing on the body, but that’s what he’s doing by leaning in so close.

“I’ll find you. I’ll find all of you, and I’ll bring you home safe.” He’s not sure who he’s talking to. It might be to Beta-24 and the rest of his brothers. It might be to Bucky. God knows how he’d failed the first few times.

Steve hears the door squeak behind him, hears the awkward shuffle of sanitized shoe covers. It’s time to go. He pulls the sheet back up, but not before he spares the back of his knuckles to brush a lock of hair off of the cold, white forehead before him. “Goodbye, Beta-24.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


It takes precisely forty-six days to pull together all the pieces of the puzzle, but when the time comes Steve pulls on the spare suit that he’d stashed in a duffel at Sam’s place, where he’s been holed up in the guest room when he and Sam weren’t chasing down cold leads; he and Sam rendezvous together to an empty lot outside of D.C., where they’re picked up by Natasha in an unmarked vehicle and drive out even further to a small plot of private land in West Virginia. Clint’s there, waiting with a small Avengers quinjet. It’s best if nobody knows they’re going.

“Maria can’t be here, but she’s got tech support with Tony Stark,” Clint greets, already strapped-in and seated in the main pilot’s seat. Natasha joins him in the front and squeezes his shoulder; Clint nods in quick understanding. “It’ll be a sixteen-hour flight to Khan Tengri. We’ll get there at around four AM, so get some sleep. We won’t be stopping.”

Steve says nothing. Sam nods back, reiterating their pre-planned destination to confirm. “It’s at the easternmost tip of Kyrgyzstan, right next to Kazakhstan and China. Got it.”

Three hours in, Steve’s looking out the front windshield past Clint and Natasha, down at the early afternoon light glancing off of the waves of the Atlantic. He’s churning worse than if he’d had a storm in his gut. “Blood Mountain; that’s what Khan Tengri’s known as in the native languages,” he mutters. Blood Mountain, Blood Mountain, _Blood Mountain_. Steve knows that the nickname is because the marble peak lights up at sunset, but the alternate interpretation is impossible to avoid, not when they’ve pinpointed the location of Hydra’s offshoot cloning facility.

It’s buried somewhere in the mountain, into the base below the glacier but not so far up that the entrance is beyond the obscuring treeline. Kyrgyzstan is mostly mountain, anyway, rich in gold and rare earth metals. It’s landlocked, isolated, and mostly pastoral in the parts that aren’t mountainous. 

The Kingdom of Wakanda may be the most abundant source and have the only near-surface vibranium deposits in the world, but that doesn’t mean that vibranium exists elsewhere, in small quantities and at excruciating depth, difficulty of retrieval, and extravagant cost. There’s not much vibranium and adamantium in this mountain range, but there’s enough to make it worthwhile, if the payoff they find is to be expected.

Sam’s warm by Steve’s side; their thighs press together, and it’s comforting. It’s comforting in the way it has been for that scant handful of months they’d spent running from one obscure corner of the globe to the next obscure corner of the globe. It’s familiar, and warm, and even if Steve’s not sure if anything can quell the heavy knots tying up his insides from the base of his spine to his tailbone, at least he’s not alone. 

Sam himself is poring over a geological survey of the area, which includes a map that has a red X over the facility location. The site probably doubles as a mine, and they’ll be going as deep as they can. “Not much use for my wings, here.” Sam shrugs. “Clint and I will be going shallow, you and Nat go deep.”

Steve hasn’t looked away from the front. “That’s right.” He pauses, considering. “You should sleep.”

That earns him a slight nudge of an elbow to his bicep. “Don’t think I haven’t seen the bags under your eyes, Steve. Nat and I have got first watch.”

Ok, Steve thinks. _Ok_. “Yeah.” 

He doesn’t have anything better to do. He doesn’t know if there’s anything else better to do. He could spend the whole time working himself into a further mess, or growing so tense he can hardly bend over to pick up his shield, or losing track of what he’s supposed to do, anyway. The muted, oddly crisp drawl of Stark’s voice through the radio sounds almost like Howard’s—does Stark know that he reads statistics and coordinates and strategies in the same pitch and tone and pace as his father? 

It’s as disconcerting as it is comforting, and irrationally endears some nostalgic part of him. He ends up dead to the world for the entire trip, since nobody bothers to wake him up after he nods off against Sam’s shoulder. The others don’t look any worse off for having split sixteen hours evenly between them to monitor the autopilot.

He ends up dead to the world for the entire trip, since nobody bothers to wake him up after he nods off against Sam’s shoulder. The others don’t look any worse off for having split eighteen hours evenly between them to monitor the autopilot.

Steve doesn’t dream of anything while he’s asleep, and he’s not sure if the endless dark is less of a misery than the whirlwind rushing of his usual fare—of himself, being cut by the glass from the broken windshield of the Valkyrie as water surges into the cockpit in a swell of the coldest, whitest hell; of his neck breaking from the whiplash of that final collision, of all the times his neck has broken from his early mistakes in the field; of all the floods of fire and blood and soil, of all the unshat shit that he’s wiped off of his face and spat out of his mouth, of all the allied screams he’s silenced himself because there’s only one thing left to do when a man’s legs are up over his head some twenty yards and his insides are all out some twenty yards in the other direction; of all the times Dernier got cussed out for his bad timing with his fuses, of Morita howling over their little radios of an ambush, of Dugan’s bad gas from their k-rations, of Falsworth getting his beret shot off his head by rebel friendly fire and shivering that whole night through, of Jones reciting poetry he’d learned in college by the fire while they waited for the frost to melt off their gear, of Bucky cleaning his rifle over and over and over while he sat on a log with an ankle over one knee and gave no care to the snow melting in the small V of his neck exposed by his unbuttoned coat. 

He doesn’t dream of anything, and the deceptive, shadowed lull of that empty state carries with him as the plane prepares to land and he gathers his gear.

“Blood _Mountain_ ,” Natasha languidly comments as she stretches before disembarking. It sounds like a purr. Steve has known Nat long enough that he knows that it’s a sound of predation, rather than of pleasure. With Natasha, they might be one and the same. There’s not much of a difference between killing and saving. The only things that change are your perspective and your reasons. Steve has done both of those things and knows intimately that there, indeed, is very little difference. He hasn’t used a gun for years, hasn’t needed a gun, doesn’t care for guns, but—he still takes the pistol she passes over to him and tucks it into a holster strapped to his thigh. He has a couple of knives strapped to the other. Unlike guns, they stick when he throws them. 

Clint lands the quinjet in a clearing a half mile distant, for security. They walk the rest of the way in silence; the temperate forest between them and the base of the mountain is dripping with fog and dense with the faint rustle of nocturnal life. It’s the peak of summer; even at these high elevations it shouldn’t be so cold, but it is. It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s cold. 

Steve’s gone over the codes to the facility doors so many times he could say them on his deathbed, and yet—

Natasha briefly places a hand below one of his shoulderblades to get his attention. 

“Breathe, Steve.” 

He breathes. He grips his gun; he grips his shield. He grips his gun tighter, and inputs the number into the hidden panel. The hologram of lichen-covered rock fizzles away to reveal a heavy metal door, which begins to slide open with the soundless hum of constant use. 

Steve breathes. “Let’s go.”

Inside, the facility is surprisingly bright. 

Natasha inputs another code which locks the doors open, and the light spills out into the darkness like a lantern at the bottom of the sea. None of them look back to judge the length of their shadows.

They take a step, and then several more. There are two hallways branching out from the main entrance, on either side of a lone, industrial elevator. There are two keycoded staircases tucked off to the far edges of the large hexagonal room—the overall effect is unsettlingly symmetrical, unaided by the fact that Hydra’s emblem is stenciled in a livid, flaking red in the center of the floor. It’s quiet, but there’s something about the emptiness of their introduction to the base that makes it hard to determine if their setting is silent in the way it gets before an ambush, or if merely indicates their arrival at a grave.

“Widow and I will go under. Falcon, Hawkeye—hit the hallways. You’ve got your packs. Get what you can and send the rest to hell.” He’s only distantly aware of what he sounds like, but none of that matters right now. He’s too cold to feel much else itching in his bones.

Clint grunts. The sound echoes. His voice is dry. It holds the false suggestion of perpetual, jaded amusement. “Roger that, Cap.”

Sam and Clint are capable, so Steve heads for the elevator without bothering to watch them split up left and right. There’s a small device in Natasha’s palm that produces a small, holographic projection of the facility; like Howard, the younger Stark becomes exponentially more resourceful the more limited his information happens to be. It’s a convenient talent to have inherited.

“They shouldn’t run into any trouble,” Natasha says. “The five levels above us are mainly Hydra residences and bureaucratic office space, as well as the first few below. It’s the ones underground that remain a mystery. Their deep-coring mine adjacent is currently inactive; it’s all mechanized and we wouldn’t have access in the first place since construction didn’t account for any human-sized maintenance tunnels. There’s nothing there, so we should focus on what’s directly below us.”

Steve presses the button for the lowest floor they can access, which happens to Basement Level 9. They hadn’t been able to obtain the access codes for Basement Levels 10-21; they had no information about what was below other than how many floors there were in total. The projection shows the approximate location of the staircases and the elevator; it gives estimates of the ceiling heights, square footage, and perimeter boundaries, but nothing else. Steve’s been around for long enough that he knows better than to let himself imagine what he’d find. 

He had plunged the Valkyrie into the Arctic Sea before the liberation of Buchenwald but after the liberation of Auschwitz. He had seen pictures, had read the reports; but then there had been the train, in the Alps, and Steve’s motivations had spun down into a red, red needle of agony and he’d lost his perception of the entire war in grief. Although the Howling Commandos had been primarily applied towards the extermination of Hydra, it didn’t change the fact that Hydra itself, at its origin, was a radical, deep-science offshoot of the Nazi machine. They, unlike the rest of their cohort, left very few bodies behind in their laboratories and barracks. 

It’s something that he thinks about more often than not—was it worse to leave your body behind as evidence of the atrocities to which you had been subjected, or was it worse to have your existence wiped from the face of the earth? Steve had lost count of how many faint, blue scorchmarks he’d counted running the SSR’s missions. He’d lost count of how many names were lost to the void.

But that’s only considering Hydra’s past outlook on research and development. Has anything changed since then? Their political outlook has blurred so thoroughly into the norm of modern security practice that Steve has no idea whether or not they still use strange machines with hooks and barbs suspended over stained tables with leather straps strained by resistance. Given what he’s seen of the chair seized by the FBI after Natasha’s document release, it could be anything at all. 

He shrugs. “We’ll know soon enough.”

The elevator doesn’t ping when it lands, which is simultaneously a blessing and a curse—it grants Steve the time to tug Natasha back behind his shield, but he then he’s forced to watch the guard directly in front of the open doors deliberately turn a grizzled, shorn head around to reveal a face that’s not unlike what Steve remembers of George Barnes, Bucky’s father. The guard—the clone—is wearing what appears to be a simplified, dual-sleeved version of the tactical uniform Beta-24 had worn. There’s a small patch on the left shoulder that’s embroidered with an “8”. 

The clone holds an assault rifle, but the arms that lift it are slow. Natasha shoots at the clone’s hands, but the gun doesn’t drop. She shoots at his knees, at his shoulders, at his groin and neck and face. Beta-8 moves closer, and the gun doesn’t drop. Ignoring Natasha’s assault, Beta-8 only fires once, at a panel on the far wall that causes all the lights on the level to flash red and pulse in time to a terrible, thumping siren; it’s loud enough to rattle the spent casings scattered on the floor. 

Suddenly, what comes to Steve’s mind is both far-removed and terribly relevant. His team—the team—SHIELD’s former Strike team, under his command and to which he’d previously entrusted his mundane life on more than one occasion up until the point when they’d done their best to beat him into submission in the Triskelion elevator, that team—they’d been a team, like brothers-not-brothers, almost, almost like friends, except they weren’t in the end, at all. This team, these men, these almost-friends, they’d foisted “classic” movies on him on occasion, along with their company. 

At the time, he had enjoyed it. Their company always, their movies sometimes. He doesn’t know if he should feel guilty about that—he only feels dirty.

One of those had been _The Terminator_. The similarities to the current situation are rather disorienting. 

“Steve,” Natasha hisses. Her gun clicks, empty. She reloads. Her face has gone utterly white. “ _Steve_.” 

Steve’s body automatically responds after the delay; it lunges forward to smash the sharp edge of the shield into Beta-8’s torso. The fabric tears, but beneath, an outer layer of interwoven skin and electronic mesh splits like melted butter to reveal a jagged, patchwork puzzle of hot metal and sizzling, altered meat; it’s crawling through with the blooded chrome worms and maggots of machinery, clicking and ticking in time to some inexplicable prerogative. Steve’s shoved back, leaving the shield lodged into Beta-8’s chest.

Beta-8 doesn’t bother to remove the shield as he starts regaining the several paces he’d lost. The machines—the robots—imbedded into Beta-8’s body burrow in and out of his exposed flesh and do their best to knit his split torso back together, around the shield. They eject chunks of ruined muscle and fat out of one end, and with the other, ooze some greyish substance that writhes until it takes the color and form of new, healing material. It’s unlike anything Steve’s ever seen in his strange life, unimaginably worse than the lurid story he’d seen on that borrowed DVD. 

It doesn’t take long for Beta-8 to come close enough that the spluttering mist of blood and sparks splatter onto Steve’s face, into Natasha’s hair. Some bullets have gotten wedged into the body; others have ricocheted and been stopped null by the shield. 

Then, Beta-8 stops and deliberately tugs on his torn, dripping jacket. Cables gloss with sanguine luster inside of him, where Steve should have been seeing guts. There should have been viscera pooling on the ground, but it all holds itself together with shiny little jointed legs, with writhing wires and netting—instead of gathering his intestines to himself like any other man would have done, Beta-8 only tucks a stray wire back under a rib, looking vaguely satisfied, like no other man would be.

“I’ve heard of you,” he says. “The good Captain, the man out-of-time. The Black Widow, the defector.” 

His voice is, _is_ —

Steve lifts his gun. He points it right at the empty, red-weeping hole of Beta-8’s shot-out left eye socket, but Beta-8 is so calm that Steve can’t bring himself to keep his weapon on-target. The barrel ends up being directed down off to the side; Steve feels like his labored breathing is louder than the wail of the alarm. “So you have.”

The air is heavy with a hellish taste, full of sharp ozone and smoke mixed together with the pulse of the siren; it’s so much that Steve is nearly dizzy with the need to be sick.

“I was waiting for you.”

“Why?” Beta-8 doesn’t answer immediately—one shoulder drops in contemplation. The gesture, so familiar, opens up a fissure along the bottom edge of Steve’s heart. He tries to shut it, but the sickness burning behind his eyes and under his throat and deep in his gut shifts, horrifyingly, with the disturbed longing familiar from when he’d still thought Beta-24 was Bucky.

Half of Beta-8’s face is gone, and the synthetic muscle beneath ripples in self-repair when he speaks. “Were it not for me, perhaps none of this would have ever been brought to fruition; perhaps you never would have had to come here, but to you, I do owe some measure of my life, and in consideration of how I was the beginning, and of how I wish to be the end, heh.” The chuckle reads as an echo, as close as it is far.

“ _Why_?” Steve pleads. Natasha’s gripping his elbow hard enough to bruise, although the mark could never linger. 

Beta-8 looks so…it’s not pride, nor is it relief, nor is it joy. Strange, lonely bliss spreads across the remains of his aged features, unsettling in its sincerity. “It was time for us to die. All of us, together, as it should have been. You’ll complete the mission? You’ll kill us?” Desperate expectation renews tragic youth to the timbre of his voice. “I’ve already activated the self-destruction protocols for the base. As for Hydra, you shouldn’t need to worry about here. I kept them in the dark, and they’ll think nothing of following the termination procedure.” Beta-8 pauses, but only to reach out abortively. His hand drops to his side and his head droops in in plaintive supplication. “Please, please kill us—but if you don’t, be our witness.”

At that moment, Steve’s comms flare up and Maria cries out, her voice ringing. “Cap, Widow, get out of there, right _fucking now, shit, **shit**_ —“ The transmission cuts off as the floor beneath their feet rumbles; it tilts a scant degree down to Steve’s right. The fluid on the floor starts to slide.

Steve shouts, reeling in confusion and dismay. “Wait, kill? No, I won’t, what do you—“ 

He never gets a proper reply. Beta-8 suddenly rips the shield out of his chest, and with it, most of his internal machinery. It falls in misshapen chunks and tangles, writhing in a near-sentient display of distress all across the floor. The shield is dropped to the side; ignoring the wet scrabble of his guts as they try to get back to him, Beta-8 crumples to his knees and thrusts an arm inside of the resulting cavity in his torso, gouging the gash down further so as to allow room for his other arm, too.

There is an ill ripping, a shattering and visceral sound; Beta-8 pulls out the remainder of what’s left inside of himself—his lungs, his heart, the segmented and augmented veins and arteries that branched like lattices of silver throughout his interior. Beta-8 tears and tears and tears, throwing away indiscriminate handfuls of squirming flesh that sometimes slap across Steve’s suit and cling to him in some alien fear before they slide off, dwindling as Beta-8 himself weakens from the loss of so much blood and mass, both organic and inorganic.

“STOP, _STOP_ ,” Steve cries. He tears himself out of Natasha’s hold, but in his anguish, he slips on the gory slick that’s pooled on the concrete and loses his footing for a brief moment, just far enough away that his arm can’t reach the man in front of him. It’s a brief fumble—it’s the briefest of brief, but brief is all it takes for Beta-8 to win.

Under the red alarm lights, it all looks the same to Steve, but Beta-8 finally finds what he had apparently been looking for; it’s a disconnected portion of vertebrae that bears a faint, blinking light, still connected to him by a gold-glimmering spinal cord stretched out from either end like an elastic band around an isolated bead upon a child’s bracelet. 

He displays it to Steve with plain finality upon his face, and promptly crushes it in his gloved fist.

Then, there is nothing more between Steve and the rest of the base than a sad pile of scrap metal and posthuman flesh, all still and silent, even the parts that were more gears than genetic material. 

Steve finds that, again, his body acts before his mind has properly registered what has happened. “Widow, go up.” He doesn’t sound strange at all. Does he? He can hardly hear himself over the siren. 

“Absolutely not—“

“Go _up_. Pretty sure the elevator isn’t going to work anymore. You’re going to run up nine flights of stairs and I can run faster than you can, for longer. Go first and scout it on your way out. I’ll catch up.”

Her fingers brush the back of his bare knuckles. Her nails scratch where his skin’s exposed; she’s frustrated by his orders. “You—I’ll have your hide when you’re done, Rogers.” Steve manages to crack a foreign smile for her before he grabs his shield from the floor, slippery with gore, and uses it to smash his way down, down, _down_.

He finds that he has to wind back and forth through the floors because the staircases happen to be located at opposite ends of each floor. The alarms have released all of the locks, and researchers and guards seem to pour out of the walls like the roaches did at the squalid Brooklyn tenement in which Steve had been born, and where he lived up until he’d left with the USO tour.

The building’s gone, now. It’s been gone for over half of a century, demolished sometime in the spread of post-war affluence and health regulation. There’s a little plaque set into the sidewalk that had been installed in the late 1960s, in commemoration of what would have been Steve’s 50th birthday. When he’d gone to visit it, a paparazzo had snapped a picture that made the cover of the New York Times. Even now, it’s become a stock photo that keeps popping up whenever there’s a news or magazine article glorifying the gritty, golden nostalgia of the pre-war era. Steve’s just glad that American children no longer die of polio.

In a way, it feels like he’s going back in time. It feels like he’s spiraling deeper into the circles of hell, all nine of them with an extra three tacked on for Steve’s tardiness to his punishment. The red of the lights beat harder, darker, almost lovely in their awful familiarity the further down he goes—on either side of him, Hydra agents kill each other and themselves in synchronized droves. They burn their papers, smash their equipment. They ignore Steve entirely, save for when he ducks left and right to grab harddrives and thumbdrives and things that could vaguely seem important—only then do they try to shoot him, but Steve was always faster with his shield than he was with his gun.

The depth of their devotion to their cause is, as ever, grimly astonishing. It’s been too soon for Steve to have forgotten how far Hydra affiliates would go, but it’s not until he reaches Basement Level 14 and sees the tanks that his skin skitters all fresh like it had been when he’d rescued the 107th. The dread reminds him, terribly, of those long, dark hallways between the POW barracks and that final office. If it weren’t for the fact that his skin was quite attached to him, he’d almost believe that it would crawl right off in the face of Steve’s growing unease.

It’s bizarrely devoid of researchers, or of anyone besides him, but it’s still the most laboratory-like room Steve’s seen so far. 

Cylindrical tanks of various sizes are arranged about the room, all full of some pinkish embryonic gel tainted with green; most hold twisted little lumps of flesh and metal. Some are flesh-only, holding organs and disconnected muscles in biological stasis. Others hold cybernetic parts in various states of construction and repair. Others still nurture little rippling mantles of liquid nanobots rapidly revolving around a clumped nucleus of cells. Steve slows to examine the reading on one of the machines adjacent to this last category of hosts; next to an array of diminishing statistics, a digital display reads “Beta-75,” alongside a notation of “FETAL TERMINATION INITIATED: 47% COMPLETE.”

Steve retches, violently and with such little warning that he chokes on it, the acid burning up his nose and throat enough to provoke him to reflexive, blurring tears. He can’t remember what he’d eaten last, or when. 

He hasn’t puked like this since the first time he saw what was left after someone had gotten run over by a tank. The man had looked like a crushed roach left to dry; his guts and bones shone irregularly outside the husk of his burst skin, swimming with the flies and maggots that had come hand-in-hand with that warmer span of days. The body had been old enough that there were parts that were discolored and putrid, but fresh enough that the clothes had not yet fallen away—the ruts left behind by the tank’s treads were still distinct. _Damn_ , Dugan had said. _The poor kraut got left behind_. Bucky had said nothing at all, but his hand had rested on Steve’s back, as much a comfort as it was a dull reminder. Steve had to get over it, or else.

It shouldn’t affect him now—he’s seen too much, he’s done so much of it himself—but it does. Beta-75 was hardly even a body, far less recognizable than what dead children he has already seen, but there’s a self-disgust and horror present the fact that at first, Steve didn’t realize what the machine contained was a developing fetus. 

That’s not how someone would make a child; that’s how someone would throw away the parts to a weapon that they no longer needed to have built. 

There’s bile but no solids in his vomit, so there’s nothing else for him to do but wipe his mouth and go down another floor. 

Basement Level 15 is where all the Hydra scientists from Level 14 have gone. 

There’s no screaming, no cries—it’s the stagnant quietude that clues him into the fact that he’s too late. Steve’s pretty sure that if he stops running, he’ll shake himself into useless shards. He forces himself to run past the cribs of already-silenced children, and throws his shield at the first researcher he sees. The woman and her belt of tiny syringes are knocked to the ground, but in response, the scientists around her pull out small handguns without pause; instead of shooting at Steve, they begin eliminating the rest of the infants with great rapidity.

In the midst of the rising shrieks, Steve simultaneously throws his shield again and starts firing in a desperate attempt to stop Beta-8’s goddamned _mass murder-suicide_ as fast as possible. These children are too young to know what it’s like to want to die. They don’t know anything at all.

He doesn’t have a clue how he’s going to get all of these children out of here, but it turns out that he doesn’t need to. At the end of it all, Steve only manages to scoop up a whimpering Beta-51 safe into his arms, dropping his gun with mingled shame and self-hatred to do so. He had made the mistake of rushing the first time, trying to keep the gun in one hand instead of holstering it when he had made an attempt to salvage Beta-53 from a crib. In this error, he was too hasty, and his efforts only led the crib crumple in on a pre-programmed self-destruct when Steve had ignorantly bumped into a button with his hip trying to juggle everything at once; it bisected the child straight through the torso as Steve tried to cradle the head in one arm, and he had then been forced to quickly end Beta-53 himself with twist of his fingers around the fragile neck. 

He’s positive now that the whimpering he hears is coming from _him_ , not from Beta-51 tucked like a treasure into his shoulder. Beta-51 snuffles and clings to him with Bucky’s little fingers and Bucky’s soft brown hair tickling Steve’s jaw. Steve brushes a reassuring kiss over Beta-51’s brow and runs past the unmoving bodies and down to Level 16. The kiss is more for him than it was for the child.

The floor shakes, and he runs faster.

The toddlers in Level 16 are all dead when he arrives, draped over each other in their white, bare cells. The red of the lights does nothing to obscure the blood which coats the walls—although Steve grips Beta-51 tighter and doesn’t stop on his way to Level 17, he still notices that most of the toddlers had been killed by an internal mechanism. They’re oozing a thick fluid out of their mouths, eyes, nose, and ears. Some of the children had obviously thrashed about in agony; some had simply burst where they had stood, sliding down onto the floor to never move again. 

It’s clear by now that not all of the children had the same degree of technological integration. A few by the cells near the staircase had bulletholes between their eyes, and must have lacked the remote trigger that had killed the others.

On what basis were all of these different failure mechanisms installed? Why did each child die in a different way, each worse than the last? What kind of punishment did they merit to be executed with less grace than a firing squad or an electric chair? 

He can’t help the thoughts which rush through his mind as he passes them all by, sidestepping dead security guards and technicians; they, too, have been executed. Their throats are slit and they have an extra hole in their heads, but it’s messy. An executioner wouldn’t be so unkempt—but for a rout, it doesn’t matter what state the bodies are in.

On Level 17, Steve hears muffled sobbing.

There’s a soft protest, then a reverberating, blistering bang. Another. Several more in quick succession. 

Steve runs faster, past several soundless, still rooms, all the way to the far end of the floor. “I, I don’t—I don’t want to be d-decomm—“ The voice rings sweet over the overwhelming wail siren, carrying with it the memories of swirled marbles on unpolished wooden floors and syrupy orange sauce from the Chinese restaurant three blocks down from the Barnes’ neat row house. 

Bang. Steve braces Beta-51 against himself and brings his shield up, smashing the Hydra guard into the reinforced glass with a roar that he hardly recognizes as one of his own.

The force of the impact is so strong that the man crunches like a stomped rat; he leaves a bloody smear behind when Steve staggers back with an indescribable mess still trapped in his chest. 

Inside the cell, there are three young boys. Two are dead, their heads entirely blown off by the gun that the guard was holding, a massive thing that steams in Tesseract blue but with a glow distorted into a garish purple by the red hell that Steve’s in. It looks like one of the SHIELD prototypes he’d seen a couple of years ago, but he can’t spare any thought about that now. 

The last clone clutches one of his fellow clone’s hands in his lap; he stares at Steve with wide eyes that shine yellow under the alarm lights. Steve knows exactly how old the clone is without referencing the paper sheet tacked up outside of the room. He’d seen Bucky’s face at this age before, had watched that stage of Bucky’s face in repose at sleepovers, had seen it haloed in the late afternoon sun as Bucky had fought off yet another round of Steve’s schoolyard hurts.

Beta-39, designation given by the neat number on his left shoulder, is approximately eight years old with loose, chin-length hair. He’s wearing a saggy grey t-shirt and black cotton pants, with no shoes or socks. His left arm shimmers with the same plated metal that Beta-24 had—however, Steve can tell from the bits and pieces of biosynthetic skin sneaking down like a sleek fungus from under the edge of Beta-39’s left sleeve that the clone is somehow incomplete, or ill enough that the skin that covers up the other clones had to be removed for whatever underlying procedure that needed the plating to be exposed. There’s a central IV line going into the middle of his chest, beneath his shirt. 

Steve doesn’t have the luxury to sit down and figure out what’s wrong with the clone right then and there; Beta-39 looks somewhat drained, as if he’d actually recently undergone some sort of operation after all. But that could be due in part to the fact that he’s thoroughly splattered with the sooty, smoking fragments of the other clones lying dead on either side of him like crushed birds—his hair frizzes out, singed, and the blood soaking into the fabric of his clothing makes for a harsh, smudged outline that’s not out of place with a colorized memory of one of the charcoal sketches that Steve had once drawn, one that he’d wiped a sweaty hand over in frustration to smear out all the flaws only he could see. 

“Decommissioning?” Beta-39 mumbles, bewildered. Up close, Steve can hardly hear him, but instead reads his lips and shakes his head in a vehement no.

“Never. Never.” Steve unhooks the IV bag from the hook hanging from the frame of an upper bunk bed and unzips his suit just enough to secure it against his body. He carefully kneels in the pooling blood from Beta-38 and Beta-37 and extends his arms out to Beta-39, coaxing the clone inwards to cradle the unresisting body to his own with as much tenderness as he can muster. “I promise. Hang on, ok? As tightly as you can.”

Beta-39 watches him, so heartbreakingly blank and dull that Steve’s struck with a sudden panic regarding the very real possibility that the clone could say _no_. But instead, Beta-39 hesitates; after a moment he rapidly buries his face into Steve’s neck and wraps his legs about Steve’s waist. One arm loops around Steve’s back to grip onto the shield harness and the other latches onto Beta-51. Little lips brush at the skin exposed above Steve’s collar, almost as if it’s to murmur a fragile assent that Steve can’t hear over the incessant pulsing of the siren.

Steve breathes. In. Out. The ceiling above them groans, and the plaster dust that’s been accumulating turns from a trickle into a torrent. They’re running out of time.

He stands. With his arms full, he can’t properly wield his shield, but that’s an insignificant fact in the face of the reality that he’s only been able to save two clones out of the dozens so far. Steve shudders, and goes down another level.

The density of bodies decreases floor-by-floor as the three of them descend, with the ages of the clones present slowly increasing. Here and there, empty cells indicate that not all of the clones are actually in the facility, but the widespread carnage tells Steve that of the ones that were here, they’d been ordered to terminate themselves.

These older ones, they’d fought. It explains the stranger wounds he’s seen on the numerous guard corpses, but there’s some unpleasant satisfaction growing at the confirmation that not all of the Betas wanted to die. It doesn’t look as if any of them wanted to die—Beta-8 was wrong. But it doesn’t change the fact that nearly all of them are dead anyway. Somehow, the continuous repeat of Bucky’s face all around him, distorted and contorted, acts to muffle him from the actual details of Bucky’s face. He can see it, he can acknowledge it, but it’s not sinking in the way that it should be. Maybe Steve’s just running too fast, but he pushes the thought aside in favor of the kind of distant observation he depended upon after his aim with a gun improved and there was no time to be wasted wondering about the fact that he’d killed someone with a favorite food and favorite color and favorite song and a maybe a dead mother who had loved them and maybe a childhood best friend, too.

Most of the Betas appeared to have perished from some combination of internal failsafe, gunshot wounds, and dismemberment or disembowelment. About the latter two, Steve’s not sure if they’d been inflicted by another weapon that he hasn’t seen yet or by another Beta following Beta-8’s termination initiative, but Steve’s train of thought skids off the rails and tumbles down to the river once he reaches Level 19. A Beta, designated “28”, lies slumped halfway on the stairs leading up to Level 18 and blocks his path.

He’s young. Not like Beta-51 or Beta-39, but young, like Steve is young. Younger, actually, young like Bucky had been in 1941when he’d turned to Steve with that draft letter in hand, all red-eyed and dry-cheeked. It had only been about six years ago, in biological time. In biological time, in Steve’s 1947, the war would already be over. _Pal_ , Bucky had slurred, wobbling against the doorframe to Steve’s rickety unit. _Steve, Stevie, Steve-o, Steven, I must have run out of pretty dames on this side of the Atlantic. You got to send me some letters so I know if any of the ones at home start running to you, ok? Maybe all this time I’ve just been terrible at finding a good one for you—who knows, maybe you’ll end up doing better without me, huh?_

Steve reaches forward to close Beta-28’s clouded eyes. He’d been killed trying to escape, shot several times in the back. 

Steve nearly slips on the stairs going past the body—he’s trembling that badly. Beta-51 cuddles into Steve’s chest for warmth. At first, Beta-39 had been peering about; but now, he hides his face from the macabre world they’re passing through. Steve doesn’t blame him for turning away.

On the rest of Level 19, the violence had escalated to a level where it’s as if Steve’s rushing his way through an unattended abattoir rather than a series of gaping, ruined chambers and concrete corridors; were it not for the siren, the only thing to be heard on that floor would be Steve himself—the ragged breaths, the unsteady footfalls on uneven and irregular surfaces, the occasional shout released in the hopes that one of the cooling figures with Bucky’s face would sit up out of the mess of strewn limbs and brains and guts and join him. 

None do.

Steve stops calling out, soon enough. It’s easier to duck his head and sidestep a chunk of forearm here, some shredded plating there, than to stop and examine what exactly had happened to each victim. In such torn, disconnected pieces, the bodies affect him less. Steve’s memories of Bucky are easier to disassociate from the corpses he dashes past, because none of them are whole.

On Level 20, Steve makes it precisely thirty-one steps into the last chamber on the floor before a man steps out from behind the alcove of the stairway leading down to the final floor. Beta-39 sees him first, and stifles an aborted scream into his metal fist; it’s this reaction that saves Steve’s life. The man lifts his gun, fires. Steve had ducked after Beta-39’s cry, but not far enough, fast enough—the round enters the upper half of Beta-51’s head and the resulting explosion blinds Steve with bits of brain and soft, such soft brown baby hair. The shock of it, the sick loss, wrenches a strangled cry from him—in response, Beta-39 shakes uncontrollably, digging his fingers and toes into Steve’s uniform as best as he can to maintain his grip on his unsteady protector.

Steve’s own agony falters under the force of his charge’s distress. He rolls down to the side, avoiding several more shots and taking shelter behind some medical equipment. 

He lays what remains of Beta-51 on the floor and spits out some of cranial bone that had splattered into his mouth, weeping the gunk of grey matter and ejected calcium shrapnel out of his adjacent eye. Steve squeezes that little hand, still warm. His heart surges with rage, and he swings the shield out from his back to defend himself and Beta-39. To release Beta-39 would be akin to giving him up for dead, too—Steve cannot bring himself to face that possibility, not now. He'd promised. He can’t risk hiding Beta-39 somewhere in the room only to have him be accidentally discovered and left to fend for himself against their attacker, or a potential newcomer coming down behind them from an upper level.

Steve steels himself in order to focus on matters at-hand, and tears his still-burning eyes away from the tiny corpse by his feet. By now, it’s second nature to take peripheral stock of his environment in a combat situation—or any situation, really. Briefly, while still crouched, he tallies up what he’d already passed by on Level 20 and determines it to be a floor designed less for physical encounters than it was for physical alterations; the primary chamber is both a storage room for spare equipment and a medical prep facility for operating rooms behind other doors elsewhere, stocked with a disturbing array of replacement tactical equipment in their neat racks and shelves upon shelves of strange components shifting in their cases, and medical supplies that don’t look like any medical supplies Steve has ever seen. There isn’t a lot of open space to make efficient use of his shield as a projectile, but Steve hadn’t been considering taking his hands off of his shield, anyway. 

“Remember what I told you about holding on?” he asks, not speaking so much as he mouths the words into the clumped hair at Beta-39’s temple. “I need you to trust me. I’ll keep you safe—don’t let go, no matter what. I’ll keep you safe.” 

He can feel the pulse of a vein on Beta-39’s forehead swell and subside against his cheek, beating to the rhythm of a heart that Steve can’t feel over the surging of his own in his chest. The clone eventually nods, and hides his face into the crook of Steve’s neck. His grip tightens, painful with some mysterious strength Steve doesn’t have time to think about. Steve rubs a hand over Beta-39’s back in an attempt to be soothing; but even though he can feel the nubs of the boy’s spine through his glove, he’s not sure if it works. Beta-39 doesn’t respond. Steve swallows.

When he rolls back out, the man is ready, and charges him with a knife in each hand; the gun has been dropped. 

The next few minutes pass in a blur of frantic defense. Steve meets his assailant’s pale eyes and catches sight of the “13” patch on the left shoulder. Steve’s not superstitious, but 13 has proven to be an unlucky number enough. The shield flies up to block a swipe at Steve’s collarbone level—the back of Beta-39’s neck—then down to protect Steve’s side, to protect Beta-39’s femoral artery. 

Beta-13’s clear priority is the elimination of Beta-39, attached to Steve like octopus and worth more than the sum of all the sunken gold in the oceans.

Beta-39 shivers and shivers and shivers, but he hardly flinches when a knife slashes close enough to cut a slit through the loose fabric that covers his body. He doesn’t look up once. 

They’ve interacted before, both of these clones. From the scent of heavy iron soaked into Beta-13’s damp gloves and gear, Steve concludes that Beta-13 had been the executioner for the younger clones in the floors above their heads; possibly even one of their trainers. He’s good—not just good, but terrifying—enough to send Steve running, pushing him back against shelving and stacked piles of equipment to send materials toppling all over the vivid light-stained floor, in waves of empty glass vials and misshapen scrap plating and shreds of Kevlar and electric cable and thousands of little white pills that crunch into a bitter powder dust to clump into a slippery paste of gore and chemical on their boots.

It’s getting harder and harder to keep Beta-13 at bay; there’s something lacking in Beta-13’s eyes that had been present in Beta-8’s and Beta-24’s—even in the child Beta-39’s and infant Beta-51’s.

Beta-13 must have been one of the few clones whose cybernetic enhancements had included a significant amount of wetware integration. It becomes increasingly evident in the jagged, calculated adjustments he keeps making against Steve, and it’s only a matter of time before Beta-13 outpaces Steve’s own adaptive rates and predicts Steve’s weaknesses before Steve can realize them himself.

The gunk accumulated on the bottom of his boots eventually causes Steve to falter when his foot gets tangled in a knot of cable that he’d missed in the shadows, and he slips. Beta-13 manages to push through Steve’s faltering barriers far enough to sink a knife to the hilt into Steve’s right shoulder as Steve falls—fuck, does that _hurt_ —but when Beta-13 moves in for the kill, Steve seizes the opportunity to drop his shield and grapple the knives away from Beta-13. While they’re struggling on the floor, the comms in Steve’s helmet manage to spark back to life and Sam’s voice patches through, shouting out Steve’s name in-between codes and phrases of all kinds. Immediately, Beta-39 claps his hands over his ears to drown out the sound, but Beta-13, with his wrists trapped in Steve’s hands over Steve’s shoulders, isn’t so lucky.

Steve, pinned on his back, watches with a mounting sense of sickness as deep groan emerges from somewhere deep inside Beta-13’s body, neither wholly of organic or mechanical origin. There’s a mask over the lower portion of Beta-13’s face, but grisly froth foams up out through the ventilation filter slots that extend in a band from the nose to the chin, dripping down onto Steve’s face as Beta-13’s eyes roll back into the skull further than Steve has ever seen eyes go—and he’s seen eyes go pretty damn far back. Desperate, painful gurgles escape from that covered mouth; the fingers that scrabble at the rough fabric of Steve’s chest grow weaker and weaker in-between their spasms.

Little scraps of strange flesh, dark and wet, push out between the slots in the mask and worm their way out in dangling tendrils of clotted, internal slime—like, like worms, like snakes, like misshapen nightmare arms coming out of a face so distorted by the grip of such incomprehensible pain that it might as well be a skull—they draw uneven trajectories across the back of Beta-39’s shirt as Beta-13 convulses over Steve and Beta-39 both. There’s blood oozing out from his eyes, his ears. 

The chest beneath all that black tactical gear pulses and ripples, like Beta-13’s heart is trying to burst out of his body by bouncing around inside the cavity of his torso with no regard as to whether or not that space is already occupied by another organ; struck with a sudden agony, Steve chokes back a wretched sob and makes to throw the seizing form off and away from himself—but again, Steve’s just too slow. 

He’s just too fucking slow.

There’s a cracking, a popping; Beta-13's chest bursts out like a bellows to squish them all together, crushing Beta-39 down into Steve and causing the clone to whimper in fear and press his damp face into the edge of Steve’s face where it’s partially covered by the leather band of his chinstrap. He trembles, and Steve can’t bring a hand up to comfort him because there’s no space to do so all along Beta-39's back.

To Steve, the moment feels much longer than he objectively knows it to be—but he can neither tear his eyes away from Beta-13 nor bring himself to loosen his hold. In those null half-seconds, Steve finds himself searching Beta-13’s clouding, leaking stare for something more than this terrible destiny; his focus flits between the mark of an old cigarette burn that bisects Beta-13’s right eyebrow and the streaks of silver showing through at the temples of Beta-13’s blood-matted hair. 

How did he get that burn? It looked old, and must have been bad enough that it didn’t heal over smoothly—it occurs to Steve that if Beta-13’s hair silvered with age, then Beta-8’s must have, too; he just hadn’t seen it amidst the silver of the exposed machinery once Natasha had destroyed most of Beta-8’s face with bullets. Even if, if there was something different inside Beta-13’s head, something too different to be called precisely human any longer—wasn’t he once a baby, too? Like Beta-51? An infant, with no awareness of what he was created to do? 

Beta-13 makes a creaking sound, like a boat swaying in a storm. His mask slips off of his face to bump the back of Beta-39’s neck; it slides to rest at the hollow of Steve’s throat, and trails behind it the rest of the tendrils which had pushed through the ventilation slots—they lead into Beta-13’s mouth, with downturned lips open in a maw that opens wider, and wider, and wider; so wide that the top part of his skull simply falls off to the side and leaves his body hunched over Steve’s, the lower jaw remaining on a body that promptly disgorges the entire, semi-dissolved contents of the corpse’s interior all over Steve from a trachea exposed to light. It looks like a tunnel, a passageway beneath the jutting off-white glow of the vertebrae above. Where it leads, Steve knows, but abstractly, like he’s not really there. 

Steve opens his mouth—to scream, to wail, to howl, he isn’t sure—but he opens his mouth due to some reflex, and gets his face stuffed to the throat full of floating bits of bone and crawling machines and still-firm, twitching muscle. The rest of Beta-13’s corpse collapses down upon him and Beta-39 both; Beta-39 makes the ill-timed choice to turn his head to look at Steve, and the whiteness of his face under the red-black shine of the lights and blood makes Steve retch, spewing bile and glittering guts all over their tangled bodies. 

“I’m sorry,” he garbles, pushing himself upright. The body lies slack across his lap. The top half of Beta-13’s head has rolled somewhere off underneath a pile of equipment; Steve can’t see it through the mess he wipes out of his eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—“

He fists his hands in the back of Beta-39’s shirt and coughs, wetly, to clear his airways of whatever organic and inorganic material got wedged in there. He’s dimly aware that he’s drooling gristle all the way down to his gloves, but the taste is—

Sam’s voice crackles out of his helmet, somewhat static from the blood that must have gotten in to the speakers. “Cap, Cap, do you read? What’s going on, what’s your status? Steve, say something, for the love of god.”

“Stop,” Steve hoarsely commands, speaking into the communicator. He hacks out a glob of spit mixed in with a squirming machine into the middle of the room. “I’ve got a clone safe, no more trigger codes.”

There’s silence. “Just one?” Clint sounds tight-wound, but that’s quickly explained by the faint booming of explosions on his end of the line.

“So far—I have to, I’ve got one more floor, I _need to_ —“

“You’ve got less than five minutes before the whole thing goes. Nat’s already here with us.” Sam’s gone all soft and low with concern. “See you up top, Steve.”

A startling rush of affection helps Steve muster the strength to roll the body off of his legs and shake off the rest of the glaze of shock that dulls his mind. “See you up top, Sam.” 

He grips Beta-39 tighter and staggers to his feet, sidestepping the shadowed, unknown detritus scattered across the floor. He yanks the knife out of his shoulder and throws it off to the side along the way, where it clatters and bounces and disappears. The ache goes deep and lingers like a bad cough; although the knife hadn’t struck anything _crucial_ , just because the wound will seal in a matter of minutes doesn’t mean that Steve won’t be feeling the damage for a while.

He looks back, once.

Beta-13 seems so small, lying there alone and incomplete; the glare from the light reflecting off of everything around him makes it seem as if he’s facedown on a pane of ice, rather than cement glossed over with vomit and gore and blood from his continued exsanguination—as if he’s fallen into the snow from a very, very great height, far enough to knock his head in two and break all his insides to the outside. 

Steve looks away, and scrambles those last few steps down to Basement Level 21. 

Level 21 is dark, entirely dark. There’s no siren here, no flashing red lights; the sound and sight of them quickly muffle as Steve moves further down a corridor that illuminates itself with motion sensors as Steve passes by, only to dim out after he’s moved not even ten paces beyond the fixtures. It provides the illusion that he’s encased in this peculiar bubble of sterile light, neither warm nor cold, shuttling him beyond closed door after closed door to end at a pair of them at the end of the hallway. 

Steve pauses, uncertain of what he’ll find—but he’s already reached the lowest level facility level within Blood Mountain. It almost feels as if he’s defeating the purpose of going into hell if he turns around now; but he had never intended to turn around until he’s seen all there is to see in the first place. He readjusts his hold on Beta-39, and reaches for the doors.

They’re unlocked. He almost expected them not to be.

Inside of the chamber, the lights work much the same way as they had in the corridor; however, they stay on instead of turning off as Steve walks further into the room. His walk slows to a crawl, then a standstill—the instant that last wall illuminates himself, his knees buckle. Were it not for Beta-39’s scramble to stay attached, Steve might have fallen to the floor. He might have. He doesn’t know—but he releases a cry out of his body that he didn’t realize he could make; a terrible, irregular wail that echoes throughout the laboratory and drowns out the faint clicking of the machinery that surrounds them.

It’s Bucky. 

Bucky, with his lips in a bow; Bucky, with his lashes dark on his cheeks; Bucky, dismembered and disassembled, mounted up upon the wall in a display both efficiently scientific and straight out of the most ghoulish of dreams Steve’s unrestful slumbers have created for him. He didn’t realize he had hope left about Bucky until it crashes, awfully, all about him.

He’s done it. He’s found Bucky, Bucky Barnes, James Buchanan Barnes, in the flesh, in the frost.

Bucky, with a cybernetic left arm exploded out in a suspended rotating display upon a research table. Bucky, with separate little cryogenic chambers for his heart, his lungs, his liver, his stomach, even his goddamned _gallbladder_. Bucky, with neat little rows of vials labeled as samples of skin, of blood, of bone marrow, of semen. 

Bucky, dead.

His limbs are spread out across the room, in various states of preservation. His head is inset into the wall as some kind of trophy; it’s right at Steve’s face level, just a little below. It’s where Bucky would have been had he been standing upright with a whole body. Of all the details, this is the one that nearly fools Steve into thinking that his eyes are seeing things wrong. At any second, Bucky could walk out of the wall, and laugh at the mess Steve’s made of himself. Bucky could reach out, tug off Steve’s helmet and smooth back Steve’s bloodied hair, but he doesn’t move at all. Bucky can’t move at all, not with his body sectioned out so neatly, marked and categorized and scattered on tables.

Steve doesn’t realize that he’s staggered forward, moaning in heartbreak, until his forehead rests on the frozen glass above Bucky’s forehead. He cries, and his tears freeze to the glass—he leaves smears of rust and dirt on the shining chrome around the cryogenic capsule.

Slender fingers enter the periphery of Steve’s fogged vision, and he looks down to see Beta-39 touching the glass, utterly rapt. “Alpha,” the clone whispers, disbelieving and starry-eyed. “ _Alpha_.” 

They look the same. Were it not for the ice and filth and years and suffering that lies vast between them, they look the same. They damn fucking look the exactly the same, and Steve bites his tongue so hard the blood that seeps out between his wobbling, hurt-twisted lips is, at last, his own.

There’s a crackle in Steve’s helmet again. “Steve, you’re at _negative two_ , we’ve just lost Upper Levels 4 and 5, so get your _fucking star-spangled ass_ out of there.” 

Stark’s right. Steve needs to get out. He needs to get Beta-39 out. He’s done what he’s come here to do.

He’s so close to the glass that he can’t see his reflection in it. His eyelashes leave ugly smears across the surface with each grubby blink he makes. “Buck, I—it’s over. It’s all over. You can rest now, I’m sorry I couldn’t, couldn’t have come sooner. I didn’t know.” He clutches Beta-39 so tightly that the boy squeaks in protest. “I didn’t know and I’m not finished and I don’t know what to do but I _promise_ , Bucky, I promise, I’ll take care of it, of everything. You don’t have to do anything anymore. You just have to run up to your ma and pa and sleep, for real. Go somewhere warm, you jerk. And you can—“

Steve’s voice breaks, along with a large portion of the ceiling. The block lands about three meters to Steve’s left, crushing a table and scattering ice and glass across the floor. A fire sparks to life in the midst of the destroyed machinery. The communicator crackles in furious concern, but Steve forges on. “You can tell me all about it later. So it’s not goodbye, not really.”

He reaches back, tenses up, and smashes through the glass—reaching in, Steve brushes the crystals of frost away from Bucky’s face before he leans forward and presses their lips together, disregarding how the edges of the broken window cut into his jaw and temple. “See you, Bucky.”

Steve’s never felt so cold in his life, but it’s almost as if he can see the flush returning to Bucky’s skin as he pulls away. He shivers, and pulls Beta-39 close. “Let’s get some sunshine, son.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


By the time they get to the surface, Steve’s on the verge of collapse. He stumbles out into the clearing into the early morning light; even outside the base, there are bits of flesh and bone everywhere, probably from the rest of Steve’s crew blowing the exterior Hydra patrol to bits. It’s attracting swarms of carrion birds, but no vultures, not yet. Just crows. Natasha, Sam, and Clint must have gone to fetch the quinjet. That’s ok. Alone time would be good, even if it’s just for a few minutes. 

The frigid, fresh mountain air cuts into his face, his throat; Steve briefly detaches a hand from his cargo to tug off his helmet and buckle the chinstraps through a loop on the back of his uniform. He keeps the shield dangling off of one wrist kept through a strap, just in case something crawls up out of the hell he’d just left behind. The wind helps to dry the blood still on his face, and peels it away in little flakes not unlike how old wallpaper crumbles off of ruined plaster.

He can feel Beta-39 peering curiously at their avian company, circling so close that Steve can very nearly feel their wingbeats against his skin. What he _does_ feel is the sticky warmth of Beta-39’s face pressing into his neck, Beta-39’s fingers wrapping themselves around the straps of Steve’s suit. The motions are tentative, shy. Sharp worry prompts Steve to check in with the lonely weight in his arms.

“Beta-39,” he murmurs, reassuringly. “Do you see them?”

The clone—the _boy_ —doesn’t respond immediately, so Steve adds, “They won’t hurt you.” If Steve can have his way, nothing will ever hurt Bucky ever again, no matter in whatever shape, form, or faded memory that Bucky himself continues to exist.

Steve suspects that the amount of scrutiny he’s receiving from Beta-39 stems more from uncertainty than it does suspicion or skepticism. It’s painfully endearing, feeling him squirm in embarrassment at being caught looking at Steve. The laugh that escapes from Steve’s lungs, surprisingly, is genuine. “Can you say it? Crows.” 

Has Beta-39 even been outside before? Steve doesn’t know. Steve doesn’t know what kind of education Beta-39 has had, or if he’s had any at all. Some things, Steve can assume. Beta-39 had most likely been accustomed to a life of strict routine and medical violation—he had most likely never made a choice for himself. 

He might have, but only under select circumstances. Steve’s too exhausted to think very deeply about anything right now, but when he’d first found Beta-39, the boy hadn’t been actively resisting his own murder—but after, when Steve had been carrying him around deeper underground, he’d shown distress at being confronted with Beta-13; but not when glancing blows managed to strike or cut him. Is this dichotomy more due to context than it is a lack of self-preservation? Or is it a lack of something else? Beta-39 _had_ covered up his ears without prompting moment Sam started listing the codes through Steve’s communicator, so something’s going on, but Steve doesn’t know what.

“Crows,” Beta-39 responds. It breaks Steve’s train of thought; for a moment, time ceases to matter. “Crows.” 

In the quiet of dawn, Beta-39’s voice is finally clear. If it weren’t for the smoking corpses around them, or the creaking, crumbling base behind them, or the dense vegetation in front of them, Steve could have almost gone back to Brooklyn at the disorienting recollection. 

“God, you sound just like he did when he was your age—“ Steve very nearly fumbles his precious bundle at the swell of unfathomable love, so hurting. He thought the stupefaction of the inexplicable had ceased to impact him as much as it had at the very beginning when he had entered the theater of war out of the theater of…theater, but obviously, he was wrong.Beta-39 scrabbles at Steve’s straps to stay where he is, and in apology, Steve bounces the child up to rest more securely upon his hip. It occurs to him how intensely stupid it was to ask whether or not Beta-39 could say _crows_ when he could clearly pronounce _decommissioning_ , but whatever. He’s gotten Beta-39 to say something.

His hands are trembling. He can’t make them stop. “Sorry, sorry,” he shudders. What if Beta-39 doesn’t like him? What if the boy doesn’t want to talk to him, or if Steve messes up trying to assure him that everything is going to be ok? What is he even _like_? Steve can’t make assumptions about the boy’s personality, no matter how many things he’s heard about inherent genetic predispositions. “Beta—I need to call you something other than a letter and a number. Do you have a name?”

Beta-39 blinks at Steve, and his face goes from contemplative to intent; although he doesn’t look away from Steve’s face while he’s thinking, he pouts. His lips go out and his nose crinkles up and his eyebrows come together in the middle. It makes him look a bit like a small, squished duck. Steve struggles to suppress the huff that nearly escapes his chest—whether it’s from laughter or nostalgia, Steve doesn’t know.

“I don’t have a name,” Beta-39 eventually replies. It’s stated as fact, plain and impassive; his face says otherwise, though. The duckface slides away into shyness, and he hunches in a little, retreating away from Steve’s stare. It _is_ a stare, because maybe Steve hadn’t been expecting English quite that standard. It’s so standard it could be from anywhere in the United States, but there’s something uncannily precise about it, like how news announcers nowadays apparently have to go to school and learn how to speak English in a way that’s so quintessentially American that there’s no place that’s home to people who actually sound like that. It’s not Midwestern—and it’s not a New Yorker’s. 

But the uncertainty he’s receiving from Beta-39, it’s terrible. The only experience Steve’s had with children consists of playing with Bucky’s younger siblings, kissing babies during the USO tour, and failing at rescuing the dozens of dead boys trapped in the windowless grave collapsing behind him. 

He swallows, but that’s a mistake because it’s mostly all blood. He grimaces reflexively, and ends up grimacing more when Beta-39 looks at him with fearful eyes. Shit, Steve’s fucked up already, how useless could he possibly be. He’s the terrible one here.

“Everyone has a name,” Steve says, trying to salvage the situation. To be nameless—it’s akin to being a non-entity, and Beta-39, warm and wriggly against Steve’s chest, is so irrefutably alive and _present_ in the now that the thought of him being only a letter and a number forever is unbearable. “Including you.” Beta-39 snorts and looks away; he hasn’t complained about being held, but it seems now like he’s bursting at the seams with foreign sensation—it seems like he just doesn’t know how to react to close, painless proximity with a total stranger. Honestly, Steve doesn’t know how to deal with it, either.

Steve holds very still as Beta-39 struggles to decide whether or not he wants to keep squirming around—he must be uncomfortable because their clothes are soaked through with blood that’s starting to dry and stick them together—but then he reaches up towards Steve’s face. Natasha has snickered more than once at Steve’s helmet hair after missions, but Beta-39 doesn’t make a sound and Steve barely feels the touch.

Steve’s been out-of-touch with himself—it’s only now that he realizes how close he is to passing out from stress, and he takes a moment to ground himself. He does so by actually sitting down on the ground and holding Beta-39 closer, burying his face into the crook between a narrow little shoulder and a blood-caked neck. In response, Beta-39 curls into Steve, tucking his left arm into the safe space between their bodies. Steve wonders if Beta-39 feels the cold more acutely in his left arm, if the biosynthetic skin somehow acts as an insulator—or if Beta-39 even feels the cold at all.

He rubs a hand up and down Beta-39’s back to warm him better. It couldn’t hurt to be safe. “Can I give you one?” Steve whispers. He shifts a bit to put them in the best patch of sun in the clearing, although it doesn’t help much with the stiff breeze. 

Steve feels abysmal. He feels like the pathetic attempt at a soufflé that Bucky had made once, for Rebecca Barnes’ fourteenth birthday. He’s soggy and deflated and when he cuddles Beta-39 and presses a nose to _Bucky’s_ dark auburn waves, it’s all selfish and Steve just can’t bring himself to care about anything else, not when Beta-39 even _smells_ familiar, underneath the cloying scents of iron and copper and salt and sickly antiseptic.

Pressed against Steve’s neck, Beta-39 gives Steve a slow nod, like he doesn’t quite understand what it would mean.

For Steve, it feels like a gift, to be allowed the honor. It’s better than the set of pencils Steve had received from his mother that one Christmas that he’d had pneumonia and Bucky had run all the way across Brooklyn to climb the fire escape and sneak into Steve’s bed. They’d been fifteen, and Steve had slept so well that he’d been able to sit up in bed and draw the next morning—he’d drawn Bucky, spooned around Steve’s hips and half-hidden under the crumpled quilts. 

He’d never finished that sketch. Bucky, asleep, had rolled over and promptly choked on his own drool, waking the whole floor with a coughing fit that had Steve in such hysterics that Steve had started hacking up blood. Bucky’s mother had appeared an hour later, glowering up a merry storm at the door with half of a fruitcake in a basket. 

The memory makes him smile. They’d been in so much trouble, because Steve was bleeding again and Bucky hadn’t told his parents where he’d gone. 

In his marginally elevated mood, Steve tongue slips when he begins suggesting names. “James—no. Not that one.”

He pushes that thought away. “Jacob?” he continues. “Joshua? Jonah?” The approaching whirr of the quinjet’s engines causes Steve to pause; when the quinjet makes good to land, Beta-39 flinches at the close sound and once again takes shelter from the rushing wind in the crook of Steve’s neck. “Shhh, shhh, it’s ok, don’t be afraid,” Steve soothes, rocking Beta-39 from side-to-side.

The speed at which Beta-39 processes his words and takes them as an _order_ is mildly horrifying. Beta-39 stops hiding immediately, and twists in Steve’s hold to watch the quinjet descend. Steve watches him carefully; Beta-39 doesn’t appear to have an adverse psychological reaction to facing something that had instinctively prompted him to use Steve as a barrier. Steve can’t see anything in Beta-39’s face to dispute his lack of fear. It makes as much sense as it doesn’t. How many of Beta-39’s reactions are him, and how many are the result of everything that he’s been taught to do? There's so much Steve doesn't know.

Steve’s careful to keep Beta-39 secure against him as he rises to his feet and staggers towards the landed quinjet. Once the back hatch has been lowered, he wordlessly straps himself into his seat, keeping an arm around Beta-39 the entire time. His helmet and shield get disentangled by Sam, who shoves them into a convenient nook inset into the wall along with the guns that they didn’t bring in to the base. Steve meets Clint’s eyes and furrows his brow in warning—hell itself could rise up at this exact moment and the legions would be hard-pressed to make Steve give up Beta-39 to another seat. Technically, Steve’s just run down into another kind of hell and staggered out mostly whole, so he honestly doesn’t give a fuck. Fuck fucks. Fuck all the fucks, Beta-39 isn’t going anywhere.

Clint, who is only sometimes an angel, simply shrugs and does the angelic thing of closing the back hatch and getting himself resituated in the pilot’s seat. Nobody says anything. 

Good. Steve can’t really handle talking to anyone else right now.

It takes him off-guard, though, when Beta-39 suddenly mumbles, “I’m not afraid.” He looks like he’s sitting quite cozy on Steve’s lap, but his limbs are stiff and his head rests on Steve’s collarbone. Despite what he says, there’s still a trace of doubt when he peers at Sam or Natasha or Clint. Beta-39’s little fingers tighten in the loop of Steve’s belt, and he ultimately tucks his dirty face away into Steve’s chest.

“It’s alright,” Steve says. “They’re with me. You can trust them.”

Beta-39’s tense shoulders relax only marginally, but Steve’s relieved that Beta-39 can hear him, and maybe trusts Steve enough to believe him. Beta-39 doesn’t say a thing for a few minutes after liftoff, but with Steve rubbing little circles into his back, the boy slowly starts to lean more heavily into his chest. 

That must be a good sign? Steve checks to his left to see what Sam thinks, and all he gets is a quirk of Sam’s eyebrow at Steve’s haphazard attempts to stay on top of Beta-39’s well-being. “I don’t blame him for being suspicious,” Sam mouths. “You’ve been through hell.”

It’s weird when someone else says it, but it’s true. Steve’s so goddamned tired, and he figures Beta-39 must be the same. Sam, who is an actual angel all the time, hands him a towel dampened with some water from a water bottle; as Steve rearranges himself and Beta-39 so he has better access to wipe his face and fingers cleaner than they are now, he catches a glimpse of himself in the shine of panel on the far side of the cabin. 

He looks like a raccoon. Where his helmet hadn’t covered up his face, Steve’s skin is encrusted with near-black gore and drying blood. He’s seen himself look this dirty before—but _before_ , it had been dirt and soot and some blood—but not like this. It’s like he’s gutted a horse and spent the whole night rolling around in it without bothering to take any of the actual guts out. He clenches his jaw and puts himself to work scrubbing at his face until there’s nothing more that’s peeling off; he then manages to convince Beta-39 to hold still for the same treatment with a cleaner corner of the towel.

When they’re done, Sam exchanges the dirty towel for a bottle of ambrosia and some manna, which are actually just another bottle of water and double chocolate chunky peanut butter energy bar. Sam dumps the towel in a marked bin with a lid set into the wall of the jet without any fuss—an angel, indeed. Ideally, Steve and Beta-39 would strip down, have a perfunctory wash, and change into new clothing; Steve’s got set of spare civs, but there’s nothing for Beta-39. Beta-39 has a deathgrip on him and Steve is so loathe to unwrap his arms from his charge that he’s committed himself to an uncomfortably sticky flight. 

Steve takes a mouthful of water, swishes, and spits it out on the floor of the quinjet to clear his mouth of Bucky’s replicated blood, his own bile, and whatever nanomachines might still be crawling around in the environment of his face. Everything is disgusting; the others on the jet are covered with their own collection of dust, soot, and gore. There’s nobody around to give a damn. Steve’s spat out far worse than bloodied water before, anyway—but given what’s in this particular mouthful, this one might be the worst.

Besides, the whole floor of the quinjet is covered in grating that drains into a waste tank shared by the small nook of a washroom set off to the side. This is also technically Stark’s jet regardless of what emblem is plastered on the tail. He can afford to clean up the mess.

The energy bar is dry and hard to chew, but by interspersing small bites with gulps of water, it tastes like it’s from heaven. 

Although he’s eating, it doesn’t make Steve exempt from an extremely brief physical—Sam looks him over and glowers when his hands brush the edges of the slash in Steve’s uniform from Beta-13’s knife. “Flesh wound?” Sam mouths, carefully checking the rest of what he can see of Steve’s body for any more injuries. Steve nods, but shakes his head when Sam asks if there’s anything else that needs attention; there is so much blood soaked into the fabric of his spare tactical suit that there’s very little of it that still looks blue, and the scraps of gore and whatnot break up the silhouette of the surface, enough that it probably does look as if his body has been shredded up a lot more than it actually did. It’s just a flesh wound and some bruising here and there. “I’ll be examining it later, all right?”

Steve nods, again. He’s barely felt the pain due to the adrenaline from everything else, but the wound is hardly life-endangering, to him. It’s not that important right now.

Steve multitasks with Sam to remove the IV drip bag from where he’s tucked it into his uniform, and they carefully hang it up on one of the overhead rafters. Sam touches Beta-39’s shoulder and asks if he could look him over; after Beta-39 looks to Steve for confirmation and Steve nods, Beta-39 slowly agrees and allows Sam to conduct the most cursory of physical checks on Beta-39 possible, only noting where the IV line enters Beta-39’s chest and the spongy, biosynthetic skin growing down Beta-39’s left arm along with other bumps and bruises. He then redirects the rest of his attention to deciphering the labels on the IV bag swinging gently at eye-level while Clint directs the quinjet towards London. 

Beta-39 watches Steve continue to eat, but quietly refuses Steve’s offers of food. Steve frowns with worry, until it becomes apparent that Beta-39 was waiting for him to finish eating so he ask something. A tug on Steve’s sleeve, more timid than it is demandingly curious, is quickly followed by a soft “Designation?” Beta-39 speaks in the same tone of voice that Bucky had used to read poetry, when the teacher had called upon him to stand in class; smooth, level, and unbearably sweet. 

Steve’s utterly gone over this boy, and he doesn’t know a damn thing about how to take care of him. “How about…Jesse?” he asks, softly. Beta-39 nestles closer; he rests Bucky’s cleft chin on Steve’s shoulder. “Jeremiah?”

There’s not a peep. Ok. Steve tries again. “Or maybe a different letter altogether, huh? George, Gabriel, Gregory? Ryan? Thomas? William? Elliot—“ 

He freezes when Beta-39 presses a miniature of Bucky’s right hand to Steve’s face. Beta-39’s palm covers part of Steve’s mouth, and his fingers splay out over Steve’s nose and cheek. “Wait, I like—“ He stops, but then speaks up again, more daring. “I, I like Je-re-mi-ah,” he struggles to say. He’s trying so hard to communicate with Steve past the obvious anxiety and apprehension he feels, and scant moments later, Beta-39drops his hand back to curl up in a little fist over Steve’s heart, apparently alarmed by his own boldness.

Jeremiah. 

Steve bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste the familiar tang of metal on his tongue. “Jeremiah. Jeremy. _Jerry_.” Beta-39 nods. He nods again, and again. His sweet face grows pinker with delighted embarrassment and he ultimately has to duck his head down into Steve’s pectorals. It’s precious, and Steve stares because he’s a hopeless gooey sap who feels too much. Feeling is horrible. It’s strange, because right now, it’s sort of the best thing he’s experienced for a long, long time.

There’s a light cough, and Steve reluctantly drags his eyes away from Jeremiah to meet Clint’s eyes as he turns around from the front of the quinjet, gesturing to the fact that Steve has been dripping blood out of his suit all over the seat and is starting to flake off the ochre, encrusted patches of flesh and whatnot drying in the air of the quinjet’s cabin. “If the kid’s stuck on you like that for good, we might need to pick up a stuffed animal or something to distract him once we arrive so you can both…wash off and stop being a biohazard.” 

Reasonable enough. The London rendezvous is in about ten hours, which gives them approximately an hour and a half to get situated before they meet with Fury. It would certainly make an impression to stride through the halls of the MI6 headquarters in a pack of four plus one, reeking of death and carnage, but it’s not ideal when Fury is supposed to get them access to the two corpses in cold storage. 

Although Steve hates the thought of bringing Jeremiah into yet another research facility, Hydra had been purged from the MI6 shortly after Natasha’s whistleblowing at the Triskelion. It’s safe. Fury’s got friends in high places. MI6 is currently the only somewhat safe place that could provide further insight into Jeremiah’s anatomy and construction beyond the digital and paper documents that they’d been able to seize; Beta-24, at the FBI, is too newly deceased to provide much, despite the fact that he and Beta-39 might be more technologically similar than any of the older bodies.

At some point, though, this would mean that Steve would have to separate from Jeremiah, who so clearly seems to enjoy soaking up the body heat that Steve radiates like a furnace—even if the stench of death is beginning to become overpowering in the small space. He needs something else to cling to, something like…

“We’ll get Jeremy a, a…” Shit, Steve can’t say it, he can’t, he fucking can’t. He can think Bucky’s name all he wants, hear it rebounding back and forth between his heart and his mind, but to say it? Steve’s composure, already so fragile, shatters and he crumples forward to laugh hysterically. It feels rather like dying. Steve knows what that’s like, intimately. “A bear. A Bu—a, a Buck—“

Jeremiah muffles a sound into Steve’s shoulder, and shifts about while Steve shakes uselessly. Steve doesn’t have enough faculties in one place to figure out what’s going on, really, but then Natasha pipes up from the second pilot’s seat.

Her normal, sultry purr is absent. Instead, she sounds like the kind of paper they use to make folding screens, veined and translucent, exquisitely delicate in appearance but warm in presence from the lacquered cherry wood frame. It’s less of a lover’s kiss and more of a mother’s. “A Jer-Bear,” she quips, and Jeremiah makes another odd, snuffling sound by Steve’s ear.

It should be a jest. It’s not. It’s perfect. It feels like it’s the most horrible joke that Natasha has ever made in Steve’s company and perhaps because of that, the most wonderful. “That’s right,” Steve gasps, breathlessly. There’s snot running out of his nose and he’s choking on iron phlegm and his eyes are doing a better job of washing his face than the damp towel did. He hasn’t cried like this since, since—since ever, he supposes. When he had cried in the bar, alone, in the dark, he’d choked out his heart in the bombed-out ruins of London and let the silence speak for itself. When he had cried in his youth, it had always been truncated by his own pigheaded stubbornness and desperation to prove himself as somebody worthwhile to have around, somebody who wasn’t weak enough to cry from a broken bone, or several. 

As a result, he’s backlogged by maybe at least seventy years of miserable garbage? Probably. It’s about damn time he got rid of it all, or at least started to. “A Jer-Bear, for Jeremiah,” he rasps, and he’s already so filthy that when he squeezes Jeremiah for comfort, the boy squeezes him back, heedless of what gunk he’s getting more covered in. 

Steve hears a little wheeze to match his own—oh fuck, Jerry’s crying _too_. Jeremiah, Jeremy, Jerry; Bucky’s half-metal clone blows his nose onto Steve’s cheek and attempts to pat Steve’s head with his skin-covered hand, but it comes across as an aggressive hair flattening treatment. Steve makes some sort of strangled gargle. Is it a guffaw? Is it a wail? The world will never know, it’s the tragedy of the modern age meant for the front pages, rendered lovingly in red and blue and black instead of white, because it’s a tragedy, folks. 

It’s a tragedy. 

Sam reaches over, because he’s an _angel_ and Steve’s fit to perish. Sam reaches over and scooches close to press thigh-to-thigh, not seeming to care that gore is seeping over into his trousers or that Steve is starting to stink like a dead dog left out at high noon in the peak of summer. Sam’s hand comes around the far side of Steve’s head, and pulls him closer; Steve’s temple drops onto Sam’s broad shoulder, and he feels Jeremiah slowly follow Steve down to lie in repose across both of their laps. Automatically, Steve wraps his hands around the far side of Jeremiah’s legs and holds him secure, holds him safe. 

On Sam’s side, Jeremiah’s hair splays out over Sam’s knees in damp, matted tentacles more black than brown from what’s gotten into it. Steve notices that he’d missed a spot by Jeremiah’s nose when he was cleaning, leaving a rusty blotch there that in the end just makes Jeremiah look like a very dirty puppy. 

Steve’s fading fast into an exhausted stupor, even though he doesn’t want to. But he’s so worn-out. He’s a rag with more holes than weave, with loose ends so loose someone could pick any one of them and pull and make the whole thing unravel into a worthless pile of scraps. He doesn’t want to sleep. He doesn’t want to leave Jeremiah alone.

But he starts to. Drifting, he hears Sam murmur, “Nice to meet you. I’m Sam, what’s your name?”

Sam already knows Jeremiah’s name, but the fact that he’s introducing himself and giving Jeremiah a chance to interact soothes Steve’s nerves significantly. He nearly nods off there, but fights to linger when he makes out, “My name is Jeremiah. And Jeremy, and Jerry, too.””

“Three? Wow. Which one is your favorite?”

“I don’t have a favorite.” Even with his eyes closed, Steve can tell that Jeremiah’s starting to pout again from the simple pitch of his voice. He’s not upset—just thinking real hard. It’s the same reason Bucky made that face, too.

“Really?”

“Affirmative.”

“You keep saying that, and I’m going to call you Jer-Bear.”

Steve can feel Jeremiah shifting restlessly in exasperation. “Why is it necessary to have so many names—“

“Nope, it's not necessary at all. But sometimes folks just do. Like you.” Sam moves, and Jeremiah stills at the hand that must be stroking his hair. Steve’s hearing is acute enough that although it’s not quite echolocation, it can get fucking close if he focuses. “Jeremy and Jerry are variations of Jeremiah, and Jer-Bear’s just a nickname. You good with nicknames?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, Jer-Bear, I like you. Steve here likes you so much he gave you three names. Natasha, you see her over there? She technically gave you this one, but I say that we’re going share it so it’s from me, too. Nicknames are silly name variations given out of affection, and what do you know? We like you bunches. How’s that, Jerry Jerry Jer-Bear—”

Jeremiah doesn’t say anything for a long time, long enough that Steve stops breathing so he can hear Jeremiah breathe more clearly. 

Then, impossibly, he hears a snort—Steve cracks open a crusty eye and drinks in his fill of Jeremiah huffing and puffing with unfamiliar giggles, gasping unsteadily from the incomparable experience of being relentlessly tickled. Sam’s careful to avoid the central IV line, but wiggles his fingers along Jeremiah’s belly and armpits and earns a squealing outburst and flailing feet on the far side of Steve’s legs. “G-good!” Jeremiah howls, trailing off into a barrage of yelping and shrieking. At first, his movements are harmlessly defensive, like he’s not sure if he’s being attacked or not and knows even less about if it’s acceptable to bat Sam’s hands away—but quickly, the fright dissipates, melting away into delight. 

The grin that begins to form threatens to split Jeremiah’s round cheeks. As it is, all covered in dried blood and boogers and tear tracks, Jeremiah’s face, contorted in novel play, instantly invokes Steve’s memories of Bucky laughing and rolling about in the dust after a toothy fight; but instead of the sharp misery of recollection, there’s a budding joy that Steve’s surprised to find within himself. Bucky and Jerry; their faces overlap, blend together, the same and entirely different. What’s bad is bad is bad but it’s done and gone and what’s left is, is—

In the front, Clint’s shoulders shake with mirth, and Natasha’s turned around, smiling. It’s not one of her disturbing, too-wide toothy things, either. It’s the real deal, all curved lips and curved eyes. “Don’t think I can’t see you faking sleep, Steve,” she snickers, tender. “Jeremy’s cute as a button but the both of you really need your recovery time. We’ll wake you an hour out from London.”

Sam places a hand on Jeremiah’s chest to calm him down, and the squeals soon die down to wheezy hiccups, then soft, dreamless breaths. Jeremiah conks out like a light and Steve figures that it’s not long before he does, too. Even so, Steve could watch Jeremiah’s chest rise and fall for hours; he could count each little bare finger and toe a thousand times, he could look and look and look however much he wants and know that this child is alive. Faced with this, how could Steve even think about escaping?

“Ok, big boy, sleepytime.” Sam’s hand is warm and dry on Steve’s neck, which is refreshing because the rest of him is kind of cold and wet, but that shouldn’t really be too dangerous to his health because his suit is designed out of a material that has wool’s property of keeping him insulated no matter how sodden he gets. He sure is sodden. “How’s that sound?”

How is it, really? Steve breathes. In. Out. He listens, and Jeremiah breathes in, out. What’s left, now? Only—

“Good. It sounds good.” 

Steve sleeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who have been around watching me churn this thing out since October of 2014, thank you, so much. _So much_. It means a lot to me to know that you're still following this story. Come find me on [tumblr](http://requiodile.tumblr.com/). I don't bite. Please talk to me.
> 
> Final Note: this is the first chapter of Act 1 of a 3-part series. The entirety of Act 1's (extremely) rough draft is available [here](http://requiodile.tumblr.com/jerbear), if you want to jump ahead. Chapters will be uploaded as I complete the final edits and revisions for the relevant sections. Additional content and character tags will be added, too. For bonus material, this [tag](http://requiodile.tumblr.com/tagged/cyborg%20clones%20AU/) on my tumblr has more notes and information, so if you go trawling (and spoil yourself) you can find a bunch of things on there. Or you could just ask me.
> 
> 1/17/16 Edit: It took me a while to write something brand-new for chapter 2 (RL being as brutal as ever), and as a result, I've also gone back and done some 'repairs' to chapter 1 here so it reads more smoothly and stays true to the characterization and overall feeling that I've set up for the fic as a whole.


	2. aside 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just who is Beta-39? What's been going on in that little head? What the hell do little 8-year-old cyborgs think about?
> 
> He's still figuring that out, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every other chapter is going to be from Jeremiah's POV. It's not fair to have just one-sided suffering.

Steve cries during his sleep. 

His brow furrows and the corners of his mouth twist down, pressed so tightly together they turn thin and white beneath the residual smears of blood still present in the cracks of his lips. 

Beta-39 watches; he’d awoken after his systems registered the slowing of both biorhythms in direct contact with him. Instead of suppressing his systems so that he can continue to obey the order to sleep, he keeps his pulse and breathing at a slower pace and watches Steve out from under the shelter of Sam’s arm.

Sam’s asleep, too. Natasha isn’t, and neither is the pilot. Beta-39 was not told the pilot’s name. The pilot hasn’t seemed to notice that Beta-39 is awake. Perhaps he does not have a name, but then Steve snuffles again and Beta-39 looks away from the pilot just in time to see a shudder run through Steve’s body. 

The movement carries all the way down Steve’s back and makes Beta-39’s knees knock together when the motion passes to him. 

Is Steve dreaming? Beta-39 dreams, sometimes, but given what he knows about the definition of the word and what actually flashes past when he’s asleep, he wonders if it is more accurate to diagnose those visions as memories—even the ones he knows he has never experienced before, like touching a juvenile domesticated canine. He dreamed once that he was playing with one, an irregularly-patterned animal with floppy ears and a sloppy mouth full of blunt teeth that didn’t hurt when they closed lightly over his fingers. He has only ever seen these animals remotely through recordings shown during scheduled education periods, so how could he know that their bites wouldn’t hurt or that their bellies could be so warm and soft? 

It could have just been a normal extrapolation of his mind, connecting a visual assumption with Beta-39’s experiences observing the subsequent Beta cohorts in the infant wards. They, too, had harmless bites and vulnerable abdomens. He remembers the first time he made this connection and it had overtaken by the sensation that he now knew something he was not supposed to, because only older Betas were allowed to go outside and confirm that puppies were soft and warm. But Beta-39 knew this without ever experiencing it, and when he confided in one of the doctors about this secret, he was told that he was simply _very astute, to have correlated several correct attributes of infancy between two mammalian organisms._

That had made sense. The education had worked, and Beta-39 was told that he was allowed to continue correlating between future sessions and preexisting knowledge. 

But he had dreamed it, not thought it; he said nothing of this. 

Beta-39 watches Steve, and Steve cries. He’s very quiet, but the cloth at Sam’s shoulder grows dark at the dampness which slowly spreads there, so Beta-39 can tell. 

He has yet to complete his understanding of emotions and expressions, but he knows this one. 

It’s sadness. 

He thinks about it. Of all the things, Beta-39 wonders why there’s so much of it. It’s all over, everywhere, inside of him to such capacity that it must be leaking out somewhere and making Steve sad, too.

Steve trembles again, but since Beta-39’s legs are up over Steve’s and Steve’s face is too far away to reach, Beta-39 lies there on Sam’s lap and watches another tiny pulse of brine run down Steve’s cheek; it becomes pinker the further away it gets from Steve’s eye, and drops down from his chin onto the back of Beta-39’s hand.

Beta-39 is careful not to spill it when he brings his hand up to look. There are tiny flecks of coagulated particulate yet to dissolve, even though the chemical constituents of a teardrop are hardly enough to make the solution saturated. He looks at it for two minutes and forty-seven seconds; then he licks it off.

The taste is not unexpected, but. Even if he had taken into his mouth some part of the layer of blood and grime on his skin along with the tear, the sharp bitterness startles him more than it should. As mild as it is, the tang makes his eyes prickle against his will and Beta-39 turns away from the sight of Steve to hide his face and blurring vision more thoroughly in the shelter of Sam’s stomach.

Sam’s thighs are firm, and so is Sam’s abdomen. He is, at least, warm, so Beta-39 does not care that Sam’s body does not have as much softness as that of the cold cot he left behind in the base.

The sudden thought of the cot makes him go still, arresting his crying with a rush of terrible shock. He had not thought of it since Steve had carried him outside. He has not thought about the fact that he would not be able to go back. He has not thought about the vast emptiness rebounding upon itself in his head.

The cot was, after all, where Steve had found Beta-39. The cot was not Beta-39’s.

Like Steve, Beta-39 shakes; he closes his eyes and bites his bottom lip and sifts through all the Beta conducts he knows in search of something that could quell the sadness, the sickness, that builds up in implacable thickness between his lungs and behind the protective shield of the subdermal netting that traps it inside. It is illogical how much it affects him; it is perplexing that it affects him at all when there is no tangible explanation beyond the reality of his organic components reacting to key electrical impulses generated by neurological distress—which in turn must come from something else.

_There is no place for fear_ is closest to the surface. He digs further. _It will burn, and be unafraid_. No, that’s not the one, nor is _Beta is Alpha is Beta._

_From ice, to ice_ is all Beta-39 can come up with his state like so; even if it quashes nothing, it calms him. Cools him. _To ice_ , he thinks to himself. He clenches his jaw instead of biting his lip and slows his heart further, resettles his plates with and without skin until they lie all smooth. 

_To ice_ , he repeats, until he winds down far enough to escape from being as awake as he was when he first thought of the cot again…but the feeling of it doesn’t escape from him like he wants it to, and he drifts back into thinking about it all the way from the start.

Where was he? He had been sleeping, he was sleeping—

  
  


* * *

  
  


He is sleeping, curled up in a knot of limbs alongside Beta-38 and Beta-37 in Beta-40’s empty cot, when the alarm goes off. 

He’s only heard it once before, when Beta-26 had been unable to return to internal standard and broke out of the reprogramming room. Beta-26 had been decommissioned quickly enough that only a few technicians had been killed—Beta-39 missed him, sometimes. Beta-26 had always smiled readily, and convincingly; it made good practice to mirror him, and Beta-26 had never minded. But Beta-26 was gone, disassembled and redistributed and recycled, because his remains were of quality. Beta-39 scratches at his nose and yawns, sparing a glance down through the neck of his shirt to rub at a discolored patch of skin on his abdomen. He rubs at it more until the color evens out. He’s not sure what necessitated his replacements; he doesn’t remember. But either way, all Betas have the same flesh and blood, so all that is required of Beta-39 is to rest so he can convert the 20-Standard raw tissue to 30-Standard faster. 

There is something different about this alarm. There is something about it that sets him ill at ease. He burrows his face into Beta-38’s side and tries to ignore it; his brothers flicker and murmur in the back of his mind, as exchanging possibilities between them. If they all stay within their room, perhaps the issue will resolve itself. None of them are doing anything amiss, so the situation probably does not involve them.

Across the corridor, Beta-42 presses his face against the outer glass wall of his own room. He’s looking at something down the hall, so Beta-39 reluctantly untangles himself and trails his IV line behind him to do the same. He blinks through the flashing red glare, and waves at one of the doctors that he recognizes down the hall.

The doctor does not wave back. 

A crackle from the speaker in the upper back corner of the room signals an incoming announcement, so Beta-39 pads back to the cot and returns to the warm huddle with his brothers to listen. “Betas, return to your assigned chambers immediately, and await further instruction.”

Beta-39 is already in his room, so all he has to do is wait. That is simple enough. 

The siren is too loud to go back to sleep, and if he and his brothers were to temporarily disable their auditory functions, then they could miss the new announcements. Beta-38 grumbles a low pulse of discontent, relaying in an irregular, rough blue. He rolls over and shoves his face into Beta-37’s stomach and puts his hands over his ears—the wavelength of his voice goes on and on, to be matched by Beta-37’s agreeable complaining in a similar frequency.

Beta-39 yawns again, and does the same. Beta-37 has just enough space left to accommodate another face in his stomach; before long, they have all returned to an acceptable level of comfort, disregarding the continuous blaring of the siren and the flashing of the red lights.

Minutes pass. He nearly dozes off from the boredom of doing nothing, but a figure slams right into the glass wall and jolts them all to alertness.

It’s Beta-29. 

A charged barrier traveling through the glass usually prevents any of their Beta-network signals from penetrating to the outside of their chamber—but it fails when Beta-29 smashes through the control panels adjacent to their room. He has a projectile weapon in one hand, a firearm, that he uses to fire behind him down the hall, then right into the control panels of the other rooms that line the corridor. He’s bleeding, at an approximate a rate of eight cubic centimeters a second, but that is secondary to his other wounds. There are four rods driven into his back that churn and grind counter-clockwise at their point of insertion, regurgitating a slurry of shapeless flesh, bone, and metal out from the other end. As Beta-39 and the others stare in incomprehension at the heavy smears Beta-29 leaves onto the glass, Beta-29 suddenly pierces their network with an irregular frequency and wavelength that’s nothing like how Beta-29 had ever used to communicate, before.

But now, Beta-39 knows that the _after_ would never be the same as the before.

Beta-29 is screaming. There is no color to his signature, just a continuous jagged flashing, punctured through by a message relay that echoes with all the voices of the brothers linked into the same network in the base. The upwelling of a widespread, communal confusion and terror causes Beta-39 to cry out in pain at the unexpected shock of it.

It is difficult to pick out Beta-29’s precise missive—but Beta-39 finds the thin thread of it, weakened by the hollow rods mechanically liquefying Beta-29’s body from the inside out. _< 30>_, Beta-29 relays, unsteady with desperation. He rests a palm upon the glass; with his other arm, he reaches back and pulls out a rod with a gritted scream that Beta-39 can hear even through the glass. When Beta-29 drops the rod to the floor to snap it in half with a foot, the rod reveals itself to have a knotted collection of shifting corkscrew blades and pincers at the end that had been within Beta-29’s body. _< 30, I must find 30. Is he lower? Have you seen him?>_ A clotted puddle begins to form on the floor, around the heel of Beta-29’s left foot.

Beta-37 stands up on the cot, and Beta-38 beside him. Beta-39, they push down to remain seated. _< Why? What is happening?>_

Beta-39 is more sensitive to the network than the other three Betas near him—between the time that it takes Beta-29 to answer, and a mere 0.48th of a second after he sees Beta-42 scream and writhe in the cell across the hall, Beta-39 feels it; the steady muffling, then the silencing of the immature, murmuring lights several floors above them, one-by-one, or in pairs, spreading a void so strange and vast he doesn’t comprehend it until he looks at the broken rod on the concrete, still spitting out the last few chunks of Beta-29’s sub-epidermal netting and biosynth muscle. On the side, it reads NEURAL-A. 

Beta-29 sees him looking.

_< It is one of many neutralization devices I was trained to wield: the auger model. Before this, I did not know they were designed for use against us.>_ Beta-29 relays, unsteadily. _< We are to be decommissioned.>_ His knees buckle in shock once the lagging silence finally strikes him, and something down the hall fires with a great blast; three more augers pierce his left side and begin to rotate, oozing out their waste of churned flesh immediately. 

He doesn’t fall.

Instead, he pulls them out with a grunt to sling them in the direction from which they had come, like a recording that Beta-39 had seen before about archaic spears and javelins—they trail behind them arcing gouts of Beta-29’s blood, and leave him staggering, pale, and firing off several follow-up rounds from his firearm. _< If you run, if you fight, they will use these against you.>_

_< But why?>_

He smiles. _< You question me, brothers?>_ And then he laughs, bright in a way that Beta-39 doesn’t understand. He continues firing down the hall, but his face shifts to something else that Beta-39 doesn’t understand, either. Is this emotion something that is taught later? Beta-39 mirrors it, puzzled. Beta-29 only looks at them, and his face doesn’t change from where it had set. _< Good. I’ve taught you something worthwhile. I would open these doors if I could—but I cannot. When the door is opened, it will not be by one of us.>_

By who, then? But Beta-29 is weakening, and has depleted his magazine, and still doesn’t know where Beta-30 is. Beta-39 and the others will find out for themselves, and there is no point in keeping Beta-29 here if he is being targeted. _< Beta-30 is downstairs,>_ Beta-39 relays, from his seat on the cot. _< I can’t hear him, but I can sense him there.>_

Beta-29 neither thanks him, nor does he nod. He simply leaves, trusting Beta-39’s heightened network acuity. 

They watch Beta-29’s pursuers—a group of armed men and women, bearing more augers, other neutralizer models, and assorted smaller firearms—sprint by in short order to disappear as well. 

_< Is it true?> >_ Beta-38 asks. His wavelengths are unsteady from the barrage of distress that the network is receiving, and he closes his eyes to filter it out. _< Decommissioning?>_

_< We have done nothing. If we ask, maybe they will answer us>_

Beta-39 blinks at Beta-37’s response. It is a simple matter for them to filter, but the fading voices, the sharp popping bursts into emptiness—Beta-39, designed differently from them, has more trouble ignoring the cries. _< Our brothers down lower, they’re asking. They’re fighting. Should we fight?>_ Should they run? There is nowhere for them to run. Below, Beta-34 blinks out in white agony that makes Beta-39 gag up some of the supplement package he had consumed at the last feeding period. _< Brother—>_

_< What about the upper?>_

Beta-39 quashes his nausea to search in what feels like a blind fumble; of the mumbling he looks to find, there is none. _They are gone._ He searches, again, to make sure—he only finds one, strangely, moving downwards towards them. _< Except one. Decommissioning may be selective.>_ He looks away, down at his hands. The skin hasn’t grown back on his left one yet, and a stab of fear pinches at him due to his imperfection, his recovering incompleteness. If decommissioning is selective, then by what basis would each Beta be retained? The ratio, from what Beta-39 can tell, is not favorable to their shared survival, and the decommissioning procedure appears to be executing with irregular protocol. Why all at once? Why now? Would it not be easier to initiate their specific failsafes? Beta-39 knows he himself has at least one, or two, or maybe none at all—but it would be cleaner than chasing him down the hallway armed with augers. That form of decommissioning wouldn’t leave behind much that could be easily recycled into a subsequent Beta model, anyway. 

Beta-29 had said that it was good of them to question. Beta-39 questions. He reaches towards the pillow at one end of the cot and pulls out a folded shirt from the inside of the pillowcase. He traces the 40 upon one sleeve with a finger and questions if, perhaps, it would be better if he were decommissioned after all. 

_< We wait,>_ Beta-37 decides. He is the oldest of them, older than Beta-38 even if it is only by a fraction. Beta-39, being a full seven months, three days, fourteen minutes, and fifty-two seconds younger, concedes, as does Beta-38. 

They all sit back down on the cot and press together. Beta-39 puts back the shirt in his hiding place, and wraps his hands around theirs. They wait.

It isn’t long before flashes of bright blue pulse down the hallway from their room, turning the red-tinted view outside into fleeting gradients of purple and white before the blue light fades. When the blue reaches them, it’s in the form of a strange firearm held in the hands of a guard with whom Beta-39 isn’t familiar. It’s large, larger than the assault rifles with which Beta-39 has done some training, and bulkier still than the standard form of a rocket launcher or small battering ram he has seen demonstrated in recordings. The guard opens the door to their chamber from the hand scanner outside, allowing the sound and light and smells to pour inside—Beta-39 involuntarily flinches at the sudden stink of it, at Beta-29’s blood and offal outside and at the bitter smoke and metallic, icy tang rising up in discolored wisps from the guard’s firearm. 

“Decommissioning?” Beta-37 asks aloud, in English. Beta-39 can hear his brother’s voice, but the alarm siren drowns it out enough that perhaps the guard doesn’t hear Beta-37 through the helmet which makes it difficult for any of them to gauge the guard’s reactions.

The guard doesn’t answer—instead, he raises that weapon, still steaming, and fires. 

It isn’t as if it happens quickly, but the unexpectedness of the blast erases any notion of anything else at that moment; Beta-39 sits there dazed, blinking through the light which briefly blinded him and feeling numb all along one side from the heat-not-heat which left Beta-37’s head nothing but a smoking scorch outlined upon the wall behind them. Beta-38 cries out in atypical anguish and releases Beta-39’s hand to scramble towards the body—his brother-twin is no longer alive, so perhaps it is not so atypical after all—but Beta-39 turns his head and looks at their brother’s corpse without shifting much more than he has to. He’s dizzy.

He squeezes Beta-37’s right hand, still held in Beta-39’s left. Even without his skin, Beta-39 can register the residual warmth of Beta-37’s flesh; fast-fading, with the underlying whirr from the biomachinery dying down at the lack of an impulse to prompt their regeneration procedure. Beta-39 has felt this happen before, under his same touch, felt the spluttering and grinding and encroaching quietness of something that he had never known to be quiet until it finally was.

Beta-39 only remembers what he felt after Beta-40 died in the vaguest of disconnected agonies; he doesn’t delve into why. He’s not supposed to. It hurts to remember. He tries not to remember, but how could he forget Beta-40, his own brother-twin? He could never forget.

His functionality differs enough from Beta-37’s and Beta-38’s that, at first, Beta-38’s trembling is incomprehensible. Beta-38 was not made to be so compromised by emotion—that was a flaw of Beta-39’s, not Beta-38’s. Still, Beta-38 turns around towards the guard, and cries, “I, I don’t—I don’t want to be d-decomm—“ before his head, too, explodes away and Beta-39 is left alone.

It doesn’t seem as if he would be one of the few selected out of the decommissioning procedure; but what would the point be if he was? Like with Beta-38 living in a world without Beta-37, what would the point be for Beta-39 to remain without either of them, without Beta-42 across the hall or Beta-29 to assist in his training? What purpose would only one Beta serve? Beta-39 does not know how his training would proceed without his brothers; inherently, they are all one and the same, and the growing void in his head from their silences, empty spots appearing here and there and everywhere all at once, leaves him looking at the guard’s weapon in a dull silence of his own. _If I were decommissioned,_ he begins to think, then he himself would be nothing at all, and none of it would matter—the ache or the loss or Beta-40’s empty shirt tucked away in Beta-39’s pillow. 

Does he want to be, though? _Wanting_ is not an appropriate factor to consider. What does it mean to want something? Beta-39 doesn’t know. Beta-29 told him to ask questions, and now there are too many questions, and Beta-39’s face feels tight from the scorching of the weapon’s blast going past his head two times already. 

Unbidden, he begins to cry, even though there is no place for fear. He isn’t afraid, but—

A dark blur comes howling out from the side, crushing the guard into the remainder of the glass barrier with such force that the crunch of breaking bone makes Beta-39 jolt in shock. He hurriedly scrubs at his face with his free hand—Betas are not supposed to cry—while the guard slides down from the glass in a mess of black and red.

Beta-39 stares at the stranger, who stands in the opening to Beta-39’s room with a heaving chest and another Beta tucked into the crook of one elbow. The stranger is definitively male, so tall of height and so broad of shoulder that Beta-39 doesn’t dare to move without permission. He has a Beta’s strength—only a Beta could kill a human in the same way that the stranger had. However, the stranger neither exhibits the typical form of a Beta, nor do the parts of his face exposed beneath his helmet resemble Beta-39’s own. If he is not a Beta, then what is he? He wields some circular, concave shield on one arm, emblazoned with a five-pointed star in the center. His uniform is peculiar; apparently made from fabric but form-fitting and nearly molded to the shape of his body from the waist upwards. His walk, when he carefully approaches Beta-39 and the corpses of Beta-38 and Beta-37, is rolling, sinuous; almost like he’s moving through a fluid medium with properties akin to water rather than air, instead. It’s smooth in a way that is uncharacteristic for an adult human male to move, another thing to mark him apart from the others. The stranger is like and unlike, familiar and foreign, as if Beta-39 has known him his whole life despite never having seen him before now—like how he knows Alpha, even though Alpha was dead long before Beta-39 was even born. 

Even with the red alarm lights, the stranger’s eyes are very blue. “Decommissioning?” Beta-39 asks. An expression crosses the stranger’s face, twisted and wet from an unseen wound that Beta-39 can’t pick out clearly from how bloodstained the stranger’s skin and uniform. Beta-39 had not struck him to cause any injury, and remains seated, unsure of what the stranger would do.

Bizarrely, the stranger says, “Never. _Never,_ ” and moves in to stand so close to Beta-39 that Beta-39 can very nearly feel the heat coming off of the stranger’s body. In short order, the stranger has tucked away Beta-39’s nutrient drip into his uniform and kneels to pull Beta-39 into his arms, alongside Beta-51. “I promise. Hang on, ok? As tightly as you can.”

Is it true? Beta-39 has been selected for conservation? He doesn’t understand. Why were Beta-37 and Beta-38 decommissioned less than two minutes before the stranger appeared? Why him and why Beta-51? Beta-39 is imperfect, lopsided, disposable. Beta-39 should have been decommissioned first—but the stranger presses their cheeks together in their one-sided embrace; his arm wraps about Beta-39’s waist and his big hand splays around Beta-39’s side and inexplicably, Beta-39 no longer has any qualms. The stranger does not seem like a stranger, and never, coming from his mouth—it sounds like never, a real never, and Beta-39 trusts him, and he feels very tired trying to reconcile how that never came about when it had almost been a _please._

Beta-39 slowly releases Beta-37’s cooling hand and clings to the stranger-not-stranger, the man; his body slots into place around the man’s torso, as if Beta-39 had been made to fit there, as if there was no other place that he was meant to be at that precise moment. _Maybe so,_ Beta-39 thinks. As the man stands and carries Beta-39 and Beta-51 out, Beta-39 tucks his face down against the man’s neck and feels the heavy thump of the man’s pulse at his cheek. Maybe so—in that room disappearing behind them, there was nothing left there for Beta-39, and he remembers too late that he’d forgotten Beta-40’s shirt beneath the pillow.

He mutes a snuffle into the fabric of the man’s uniform. The material is thick and sturdy and made out of some supple fiber that Beta-39 isn’t familiar with and along with the blaring of the alarms and the man’s labored breathing, the sound goes unheard.

The man is warm; if it weren’t for the disturbance of their setting, Beta-39 could fall asleep in his arms, even as they are running down further into the terrible silence that Beta-39 already knows that they’ll find. He looks—of course he looks, because if he didn’t then what proof would he have that Beta-33 or Beta-27 or Beta-25 were truly dead after all? He is ninety-three percent sure that they are dead—the truncation pattern of their frequencies in the back of his mind corresponded to the violent cessation of primary neural functions. Whether that was due to direct damage or the destruction of other crucial physical structures stands to be determined.

Beta-28, on the stairs, had a portion of his spine shot out. This, Beta-39 can see, peering down from the man’s grip. Were three of the bullets just further off to the side, then perhaps the damage would not have been fatal—but as it is, Beta-28 is dead, and the sight of his empty, slack face disturbs the man so much that his step is uneven afterwards. Beta-39 holds him more tightly. He might fall. If he falls, then he’s not sure if the man would stop to pick him up, or if the man would allow him to run alongside. The man had said never, and Beta-39 believes him, but still. 

He remembers what Beta-24 had said to him, before Beta-24 had been taken away for a long-term deployment—before they all had been taken away from Beta-24, because his new handlers didn’t want a Beta. They had wanted a soldier, alone, and before they brought him to the reprogramming room to rewrite what he was, he had escaped them and by chance, Beta-39 had found him sitting in a surgical closet in the infant ward. Beta-39 had sat down beside him and looked at him and looked at his face which was Beta-39’s face, which was the face of every sleeping Beta in every crib in the room just outside of the metal doors which kept the light from reaching the inside of the closet. 

_The truth is made tenuous by circumstance,_ Beta-24 had said. _They lie to you. They lie about everything, all the time, and those lies become real._ Sometimes, whenever Beta-39 missed Beta-40 the most, he would lie there in the too-large cot and remember how the words didn’t seem to be for him. He wonders if he was ever meant to hear them. _I’ll forget you. I’ll forget 23, I’ll forget 25. I’ll think I’m somebody else, somebody who thinks in German and speaks in Russian and uses American colloquial jargon and yet I have never even been to these United States—but what does it matter? I won’t know otherwise that anything was supposed to be different. There are so many of me. There are so many of you. It doesn’t matter if I forget, because one of us will remember, and we are all one and the same._

_The same? But you are 24, and I am 39. We are different. How could I remember something I have never known? We are Beta, but we are not both 24, and not both 39._ Beta-24 had been wearing a different uniform, one without a number upon the sleeve. Nameless, Beta-24 had already looked out-of-place.

_Perhaps. But, hell. They put me through three preliminary wipes already, and I can feel it changing me. I don’t even feel like a Beta anymore, 39. This last one, they say—this last wipe, they say, it’s going to change more than my mannerisms of speech. They say it’s going to change the world._

_World?_

_What world? I hardly know of any world but this one. How will this world change? Do I give a damn about how the world out there changes? I don’t belong there. I wasn’t born there. All these thoughts they’re giving me with the information they’ve put in my head, these thoughts aren’t from here, these thoughts are from that world outside and I don’t want them—but I do, because they made me want them, and want them now. They made me want to walk into that room, so I could change the world, because it’s something that they made me want. I don’t know why. But I want it. And I don’t want to want it; but wanting, at all…that’s something they gave me, from the world that I don’t belong to, the one I am supposed to help change._

Beta-39 hadn’t understood the words, at the time. He had only been four years, three months, eleven days, and fifty-six minutes old. He had understood them, but wanting—Betas were not supposed to want. 

_Wanting, it’s terrible,_ Beta-24 had said. _Don’t ever want things. Even if it is real enough to want, even if it is true, it isn’t true. Even if it is wonderful, even if it is everything, even if it makes you feel as if you are real. It’s not true—it’s not real, and because things, they’re, they’re not true and real, they can’t ever be yours. It doesn’t matter how much you want it, because it’s not real and doesn’t belong to you._

Beta-39 hadn’t understood this either. _Then what is true? What is real? What’s ours?_

Beta-24 had never replied, because they had been found, and Beta-24 had told the handlers that Beta-39 had only been sitting there with him in a shared silence—a lie, and Beta-24 had never lied to handlers before, because no Beta was supposed to lie unless it was a part of the mission parameters—and had been taken away. He had smiled, though, when they were parted. Beta-39 was still learning emotive expressions at the time; but he had at least reached sadness, and knew it upon sight.

Then, he could see sadness and know it, but not hear it in Beta-24’s voice; but now, as the man shouts out for signs of life that are not going to be found, Beta-39 hears the tremor in the man’s throat, the hoarse edges to the beginning and end of his cries, and knows it.

At first, Beta-39 looks at his brothers, looks to see how they were decommissioned; but their wounds provide evidence to him that this was not a decommissioning after all. It does not make sense to utilize a neutralization model or any other kind of weapon to decommission a Beta. Surely, they were all designed with some form of failure, so why would decommissioning require dismemberment? That would only be conducted in a post-decommissioning procedure for reclamation and repurpose. 

This is a termination. 

Beta-39 sees this, verifies it in the way his brothers and the guards are entangled, verifies it in the pattern of their respective wounds and the structural damage at entranceways where his brothers had forgone self-defense and chose to attempt escape; he sees this, and hides his face away into the man’s neck. The man said never. Is it true? Would Beta-39 never be terminated? That does not rule out decommissioning—but even so, Beta-39 would rather be decommissioned and not terminated. Surely, at least some of him is quality; at least some of him is at Standard and could be reused…but that would mean that there would have to be another Beta alive to utilize his biomesh and bone.

The man slows once they go down yet another floor, and Beta-39 looks up to see why; he sees Beta-13, and suddenly, a rush of some psychological sensation manages to chill every metal component in his body. He stifles a scream at the response into his fist—of terror, he realizes, because Beta-13 has always made him feel this way, because Beta-13 was Beta but not like Beta-39 was Beta—and the man dives to the floor to avoid the bullet that heads their way. 

Beta-39 hadn’t recognized how much the immature burble of Beta-51 had soothed him until it was gone in a mess of matter too obliterated to hope for a reconstruction. It is too quiet in his head, far too quiet, and he shakes; he stares down at what’s left of Beta-51, laid down upon the floor, and shakes, and shakes, and shakes—but then a hand comes up to cup at the back of his head and turn it away from the image. Beta-39 goes still. 

“Remember what I told you about holding on?” Beta-39 can feel the man’s lips and exhalations rustle his hair, hot and humid and wobbly like the pitch of the voice which says those words. The hand strokes his head and Beta-39 can feel the straps of the shield around the man’s forearm pressing into his back. “I need you to trust me. I’ll keep you safe—don’t let go, no matter what. I’ll keep you safe.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


I’ll keep you safe. _I’ll keep you safe._

Nobody has ever said those words to Beta-39 before, and the turmoil he feels, the painful upending of all of his insides, makes Beta-39’s breath stutter so much that he coughs himself awake, away from the memory of the base and back onto Sam’s lap.

“Woah,” he hears. It’s the pilot. “Woah, kiddo, check in with me, you doing ok back there? Sam, hey—“

Sam’s awake. In a mirroring of what Beta-39 just experienced, Sam’s hand cups Beta-39’s cheek and wipes away some of the wetness on Beta-39’s face with a smooth thumb. “Jerry,” Sam whispers, urgently. “Jer-Bear.”

The wetness keeps coming and coming and despite himself, Beta-39 cannot stop; he untangles his fingers from Sam’s shirt and scrubs at his eyes in frustration, whimpering through his hands when the leaking and coughing doesn’t subside. _From ice, to ice._ Betas are not supposed to cry—but then Beta-39 remembers that he has been provided with a new designation. It’s not even a mission callsign, but something he is meant to keep.

He grasps it. It might not be like anything he had to leave behind—but it’s his. 

Jeremiah’s throat is clogged with phlegm, and he muffles the sounds he makes into the big hand on his face. Steve stirs, but once Jeremiah holds very still and breathes through his nose instead, Steve droops back down onto Sam’s shoulder. He can see the pilot and Natasha watching him, very carefully.

“Sam?” Jeremiah rasps. _There is no place for fear._ There is nothing to be afraid of, not here. “I’m sorry.”

Jeremiah likes the sound of Sam’s voice. He likes it even when it’s low and worried. “For what?”

“I almost woke up Steve.”

The hand that’s moved from Jeremiah’s face to rubbing warm circles on Jeremiah’s chest pauses, then starts up again. “That’s all? Are you feeling ok? Do you need any water?”

Jeremiah shakes his head, and turns his head back into the security of Sam’s stomach. 

The pilot at the front coughs, gently. “If there’s anything you need, just let us know. It’s ok. You’re with us now.”

Is that a good thing? Jeremiah doesn’t know. Steve’s arms are heavy over his legs and it feels as if the fabric of their clothing is stuck together because there is so much drying blood soaked into the cloth; it feels as if they’re stuck together, too, and Steve promised.

Steve will keep him safe, and if Steve trusts these people—then Jeremiah should trust them too. 

He peeks up at Sam out of the corner of his eye, and sees Sam looking back. Jeremiah gulps, uncertain of whether or not what he is doing is acceptable. “What’s his name?”

“Who?”

Sam doesn’t seem angry, but Jeremiah feels his face growing hot and quickly corrects the rate and direction of surficial bloodflow so as to seem unaffected by Sam’s response while he maintains partial eye contact. More quietly, he specifies, “The pilot.” 

Sam blinks, but then a smile slowly begins to dominate his face. It looks so nice that Jeremiah turns back to face the ceiling again, so he can stare at it better. “Oh, that guy? That featherbrain over there?”

“The pilot?”

“Ok,” the pilot interrupts. He turns around in his chair to frown at them, but Jeremiah has had enough practice with expressions that he can tell that it’s not a real frown. The pilot is not actually mad at them. “Just because you can _fly_ , with your fancy-ass flappy turbo wings, doesn’t mean your vision or aim is as good as mine—and Jeremiah, my name’s Clint. Barton. Clint Barton.” There’s something unsteady in his voice, but it’s not wavering so much as it is irregular. Clint’s laughing.

Jeremiah sees Natasha reach over and push at Clint’s shoulder, an action that only appears to be more forceful than what Jeremiah assumes that Clint can feel, considering how little he budges. “What are you, some kind of secret agent?” Her voice is the same. It’s irregular—but light.

“Maybe. I’m so secret that I’m full of secrets. Jer, you want to know a secret?”

Not all secrets are good to know. Jeremiah freezes. He glances between Sam’s increasingly worried face and Natasha’s crinkled brow and the kinks in Clint’s nose which indicates that it has been broken numerous times before.

“Let me clarify, it’s not actually a secret.”

Jeremiah presses closer to Sam, just in case. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

Natasha, leaning over one armrest, props her chin up on one hand. “Ooo, is it juicy?” 

“The juiciest. You all ready?”

There’s silence, but just as Jeremiah’s about to vigorously shake his head in a _no_ —because secrets are usually bad, even if everyone knows them, because secrets are _bad_ and come with punishments—Clint speaks.

“People actually have at least two names. Like me: Clint Barton. The first is my personal name, and the second is my family’s name.”

It only sort of makes sense. “But I have four names already,” Jeremiah replies, small and confused. “You said I am—I am Jeremiah Jeremy Jerry Jer Jer-Bear.” Oh. He counted wrong. “Five names!” Is that too many? It must be too many. That is so many names. 

Natasha’s hiding her mouth behind her hand, and her eyes are all narrowed. They make little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. “Sweetheart, that’s one name and four nicknames. That’s your personal name.”

“Then what’s my family name?” He thinks better when he sticks his lips out and scrunches up his nose. “Beta? I am Jeremiah Beta?” It sounds almost…he doesn’t know. It doesn’t sound right, but it doesn’t sound entirely incorrect.

For some reason, Natasha’s face falls, as do Clint’s and Sam’s. Steve—Steve is still asleep, and he’s still crying softly into Sam’s shoulder. 

“Well,” Sam begins, “My family name is Wilson. But my full name is Samuel Thomas Wilson. Sam’s a nickname for Samuel, and I’ve got a middle name, too.”

“Samuel?”

“Yep. But I go by Sam.”

Jeremiah looks at Natasha, who shrugs. “Natalia Alianovna Romanoff. But that’s much too long. You can call me Auntie Nat, ok?”

Auntie, derived from _aunt_ , referring to the genetic female sibling of a parent. “But we are not related.”

“But what if I really want to be your Auntie? We don’t have to be related to be family.”

The notion baffles him, but Auntie Nat looks so serious. “We’re family now?”

“Yes.” 

“Great,” Clint says, grinning. “That makes me Uncle Clint. Clint’s fine, got it? But uncle is fine, too. Who cares if it makes me feel like an old geezer.”

Jeremiah nods as emphatically as he can. His nose is stuffy and he sniffs to clear it, wiping at his face some more with his shirt. One of Steve’s hands is lightly wrapped around Jeremiah’s knee; the grip tightens from reflex while Steve sighs unhappily and rolls his face more directly into Sam’s shoulder. It bends his nose all the way to the side. With Steve’s mouth still tightly closed, Jeremiah wonders if he can still breathe.

“What about Steve?” 

Everyone turns their attention on Steve, who at that moment releases a very small sound and bends his nose into Sam at an eighty-four-degree angle. Jeremiah is relieved that Sam gently reaches up and corrects how Steve is resting upon him. There. His nose looks much better. “What about Steve, huh?” Sam murmurs, muted. He pulls a scrap of drying offal out of Steve’s stained hair and drops it on the floor. “Jeremiah, this is Steve Rogers.”

Steve Rogers. Jeremiah is not sure what he was expecting, but since he had no basis for guessing what Steve’s familial name could be in the first place, he is not sure why he felt as if he was expecting anything at all. But it sounds right. “Steve Rogers. And I am Jeremiah Beta.”

Jeremiah does not miss the uncertain visual exchange between the adults in the plane. Clint gives a heavy exhale and looks back towards the front of the plane. “About that. We were thinking that you could be Jeremiah Rogers—“

“—Jeremiah James Rogers—“

“—Jeremiah James Rogers, right. Forgot about that middle part. Thanks, Tasha.”

Jeremiah doesn’t understand. “But Steve and I aren’t family either.”

“He’d argue that you are,” Clint continues. “And like Natasha said—blood doesn’t mean shit. Ok, it means some stuff, but family by choice is something else entirely. Trust me on this, kid.”

How is that different? Suddenly Jeremiah has three names and he’s not sure what to do about any of them.

“What makes a difference is _choice._ ” 

Jeremiah jolts at the sound coming directly above him; he hadn’t realized he’d asked his question out loud, but Sam just places a hand down on his chest again and strokes down towards Jeremiah’s navel. Without having to alter any of his internal processes himself, Jeremiah winds down at the repetitive touch. “The family that you make by choice, the people that you surround yourself with because you want to be together—that kind of family can be no less powerful than the kind that you’re born with. You don’t have a choice about what kind of blood flows in your veins, but you do have a choice about who you love. Choice is what makes you free.”

“But I never—“ Jeremiah begins to blurt, but then it occurs to him that he doesn’t know what that word means. Love. 

“You can choose now,” Sam says, while Jeremiah is still stuck in his uncertainty. He leans down and presses their foreheads together; he cards through Jeremiah’s hair with his fingers and cradles both sides of Jeremiah’s face. “You can do that. You want whatever you want, you can like whatever you like, you can say yes and no and whatever to _whatever._ You’re _free._ ”

Sam’s eyes are brown. They’re very dark, and they’re nothing like the pale eyes that each and every Beta had. “Steve wanted you. He chose you. He chose you to be family.”

You, singular. “Why,” Jeremiah sobs, and bites down hard on his lip so he doesn’t cry any more. Steve will wake up. Steve is so sad and tired. Jeremiah doesn’t want to wake him up. He tries to whisper instead, but it comes out in gurgles because crying always alters his pitch and clarity. “Why me, Beta-39, and not Beta-38? Or Beta-37?”

Why couldn’t he choose all of them? Why did he only take Beta-39 and nobody else?

“He tried. I’m sorry, Jer. I’m so sorry.”

The taste of Beta-51’s cranial matter abruptly becomes vivid in his memory, and he muffles himself with his hands. He hides his whole face with his hands. He hides his whole face and his hands into Sam and tries to focus on the faint sound of Sam’s digestive system gurgling through the layers of skin and fat and muscle.

He hides until the residual impression passes, but then it has been forty-six minutes and eleven seconds and nobody has said anything at all. The entire time, Sam had one hand in Jeremiah’s hair and one hand rubbing his back. When he looks up, Sam looks down. Jeremiah feels very shy, and he tries to snuffle as quietly as he can. “What if I choose him back?”

Sam’s just as soft. “Then you’re family.”

“Is it affirmative? Are we family now?”

“I know that it’s an affirmative for Steve. He loves you.”

Jeremiah peeks at Steve. Steve looks crumpled, exhausted, sunken. But his hands are warm and strong on Jeremiah’s legs, keeping them pulled in all the way against Steve’s abdomen. He hasn’t loosened his grip once. 

_I’ll keep you safe._

It feels true. Jeremiah somehow knows that it is a true thing. And Sam has said that he could want things, could have things—things that were true, and real, because Steve is true and real. 

Jeremiah puts his head back down, and closes his eyes. If Steve loves him, does that mean that Jeremiah loves him back? Does he have to? Does he want to? What is it, anyway? “We’re family now,” he mumbles. He’s too tired to think about it anymore. “That is affirmative.”

Sam strokes his back. “That’s right. You’re tuckered out. Go back to sleep, ok? I’ll wake you up when we arrive.”

Jeremiah doesn’t remember if he nodded or not, but then everything goes silent and dark and Jeremiah doesn’t remember or dream about anything at all—not the cot, or his brothers, or of small soft things with supple bellies and toothless jaws.

He trusts Sam to wake him up when it is necessary—even if that happens to be never. But Jeremiah doesn’t have any qualms. Steve is there. Steve will keep him safe, because Steve loves him. The knowledge of that, despite the fact that he knows nothing else about the term, warms him to his core. Steve loves him. 

Maybe he loves Steve, too. He wants to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some things to remember: Lil' Jerry Jimbo Rogers is a very strange, and very sad duck. Key point being _strange_. If you get too sad about how strange and sad he is, listen to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jz706sJMjg). It is pretty much his character song. It's very cute. It might be 5000% spoilers if you get super crazy meta on me about the lyrics.
> 
> So: Why kidfic? Why _this_ approach to kidfic? I guess it gives me an opportunity to literally strip Bucky down into the most basic components of his character without the historical baggage of his adult experiences and identity. It allows me to explore the impacts of weaponization, dehumanization, and profound physical and psychological trauma on a true innocent. I am Cheating. And children are fascinating. Also, by forcing Steve to interact with someone like this, I get to Fuck Him Up and make him think a lot about himself (as you ought to do when preparing yourself for the reality that is Parental Responsibility) and maybe get at least some kind of closure on his own depression and trauma. He is Suffering--and this fic is primarily about him trying to learn how to deal with that in a way that leads to somewhere better, even if it never turns out good. 
> 
> I guess...I'm rambling. But this story, at the most basic level, is about healing and love (and the tragedy that is robot children). Or you could click on the series link for the longer and smarter-sounding hoohah. 
> 
> Or, come talk to me on [tumblr](http://requiodile.tumblr.com/). Please.


	3. chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back to Steve's POV! He's pretty sad. Stop being so sad, Steve.

Steve dreams of stairwells; of tight, cracked concrete spirals with no windows and no railings. The walls pulse with damp, ferrous redness, turning to white with hypothermia then black with frostbite the deeper he descends—there’s nobody chasing him, but Steve runs as if he’s about to enter the arms of somebody desperately yearned, away from somebody desperately feared. It’s difficult; his legs are twiggy and his breath rips out of him in little gasps to match the sunkenness of his chest and the narrowness of his wrists. He runs and runs and his pace is so terribly slow and lopsided from the misshapen twisting of his back and the pain in his flat feet. There’s somebody waiting for him at the bottom, he knows it, but the stairwell goes on and on and on and his pursuer only gets closer and closer and closer. Whoever is chasing him has a dancing step—like something out of a show or a song or a façade of glory. Steve’s afraid to look back, so he doesn’t. Why is he afraid? He’s afraid. He tries to run faster, but he’s so weak. 

He’s weak.

It’s hardly restful, but Steve manages to sleep for the entire trip, fully awakening when the quinjet lands neatly on the helipad of Vauxhall Cross with only a small bump. He’s had worse dreams before, and the memory of this one fades quickly upon the sight of Sam using a damp towel to daub some more of the dried blood off of Jeremiah’s patiently impassive face.

As Steve blinks the gunk out of his eyes, Natasha and Clint stand up from their seats and stretch; they shed their uniforms for civilian clothing right in front of Steve and Sam without a care for decency, nevermind the fact that between the four of them, bodies are hardly the biggest secrets they carry. There’s a part of Steve, that quiet and long-neglected artistic part of him, that still soaks in the swells and depressions of fat and muscle and bone, still admires the raw, natural beauty of the strength in the physical form. The rest of him, the not insignificant part that makes up the soldier—it disassociates the identities from the flesh that contains them. You die. You depart. What’s left behind? 

There’s only the memory. In some cases, in the cases of the men killed by Hydra’s tesseract weaponry, there’s not even that. 

Scars, though. There’s something about scars, how they’re evidences of past hurts, some of which linger longer than others. Scars are what hurt you, and failed to hurt enough to kill you. Just because Steve doesn’t have any visible markings on his own body now doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know what it’s like to have them or get them or that he’s any better for not showing anything on his skin when his teammates have old lines and welts and shining patches that they don’t talk about. He’s glad that the hurt hasn’t been enough for them to leave the physical burden behind. To do all of this alone would have made Steve want to leave, too. He’s come close. Steve’s walked too close to that border before with full knowledge of just how close he was, and the feel of Jeremiah’s knees under his hands reminds him that he’s even stupider than he knows himself to be. He’s so stupid. He’s so _stupid_ , if anything had killed him before this—before he realized, before he had the chance to—

He shakes his head to rid himself of the thought. It’s not worth it. It’s not—he knows it’s not, it’s not worth sparing time and energy to past possibilities. He’s here now. Jeremiah’s here now. They’re here with Sam and Nat and Clint and nobody is dead except for—

Steve bites down on the inside of his cheek and closes his eyes. He concentrates on his grimy hands and the warm bony knobs beneath them and tries very hard not to shudder. _C’mon. Get your shit together, Rogers._

He opens his eyes with a long exhale. Clint pulls on a purple t-shirt, tattered jeans, and a bulky, hoodless parka that he leaves unzipped for the summer evening. Natasha dons similar attire. Sometime during the flight, she’d ducked into the washroom and cleaned up her face and hair as best as she could, as did Clint. All it takes is a beanie, some eyeliner, and there’s no indicator that there were ever matted clumps of gore in Natasha’s hair at all. Sam, on the other hand, hadn’t seemed to budge at all during the trip—both he and Steve are still grimy. 

Natasha smiles at Jeremiah again with that rare, genuine curve, and then ducks out while she’s slipping a knife into her bra. “We’ll be right back,” Clint says, pausing in the open back hatch. “We already radioed Fury. Agent Akbar will stay here with you and check in while we fetch some food and that bear for Jerry.”

“See you,” Steve rasps in reply. He doesn’t want to be in command, not right now. Steve does, however, spare a brief moment to assess the British agent who enters as Clint exits. 

She’s of moderate height, slender. Very short hair, delicately handsome face. Beautiful sloe eyes that he would have liked to draw, in a different set of circumstances—those circumstances being a different era in time and different hands with which to render her on paper, a different mindset entirely. She reminds him a little bit of Maria Hill, but perhaps that’s mostly in her composure walking up the back hatch ramp. A movement to Steve’s left draws his attention, and he turns his head only to find that Jeremiah, still sprawled over his and Sam’s laps, has gone pink in the face and hidden himself in Sam’s stomach. Bucky had always been easily enamored by beauty; Jeremiah, it seems, has the same weakness. Or maybe he’s just shy. Steve doesn’t blame him for being more than a little overwhelmed.

When Akbar speaks, her voice is cool, and authoritatively firm. Her confidence would have been reassuring, if Steve hadn’t been working with Natasha for so long. Professional projections don’t mean much. Besides, Steve’s done his fair share of acting, and fair share of lying; it’s not like he can’t see a mask. Most of the time, anyway. “Captain Rogers, Doctor Wilson, welcome to Vauxhall Cross. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Sam raises a hand in acknowledgement. “Not a doctor. Medic. Please, call me Sam. I would shake your hand, but these two are in need of a wash and decontamination and since I’m pinned where I am, I’d need one too.”

“Understood.” Akbar inclines her head, eyeing Jeremiah with a well-disguised curiosity. Steve’s grip tightens on Jeremiah’s knees, protectively. The way that Jeremiah is lying down exposes the shine of his metallic left arm and the IV bag hanging from the ceiling is impossible to miss. “Pardon the intrusion, but I was led to believe that there would only be the four of you, in total.”

“When we reached the base, we discovered that our information had been selectively leaked,” Steve replies. He sounds awfully croaky; Sam passes over a fresh bottle of water and Steve takes the measured leisure to drink it, watching Akbar’s reactions. “We went in practically blind, with only a vague idea of what was actually down there.”

Steve averts his gaze with a slight turn of his head, downwards. He looks at Jeremiah. Jeremiah, in turn, looks at him, the entirety of a blank, expectant slate. “I salvaged what I could.”

There’s a discreet Starktech camera in his helmet, the one that Sam had unbuckled from Steve’s suit and deposited in a little bin inset into the quinjet walls. It had been installed as a security measure, as something to hand over to his SHIELD supervisors along with his post-mission report—in actuality, it was never utilized, something that Steve had shrugged off as understandable in light of the covert nature of the operations his Strike team ran.

He knows now that the camera’s deactivation was intended to keep Hydra’s exploits to a minimum standard of concrete, recorded evidence. Despite how securely Hydra had gotten itself settled into the underbelly of SHIELD, video was too easily distributed, too easily comprehended if leaked. There was too much risk if someone sat down and really _looked_ at what Steve had been doing. However, which missions were sourced to SHIELD and which were to Hydra? Steve doesn’t think he would be able to differentiate if pushed to a confession of his unknowing crimes, and the mingled guilt and bitterness of it bites enough that he shoves it to the back. There’s little use now; it’s already happened. It’s already happened, and he ought to stop mulling over all those little details so much.

Regardless, Natasha had sat down with her laptop and a set of small screwdrivers sometime during Steve’s brief stint in the hospital and managed to get the helmet camera working again. It had been recording for the duration of their time in the Blood Mountain base; Steve’s eidetic memory technically renders this functionality useless, but even his spoken word becomes disreputable in the context of his emotional distress.

Giving up the recording would mean revealing his last words to Bucky’s head, preserved in ice. It was raw, intimate, and the whole team, including Maria and Stark, had heard the whole thing already through their communicators. It’s not much more to expose his ruin to the British operatives working on the mysteries of Beta-11 and Beta-15, is it? There’s so little to his life that still remains private.

Akbar takes Steve’s statement in stride, and remains unfazed to the credit of her organization. “We were unprepared to accommodate a child, but we can certainly make arrangements.”

“We won’t be separated,” Steve says, immediately. “The three of us, do I make myself clear?” 

Sam, _perfect Sam_ , doesn’t bat a single eyelash. “I hate to phrase it like this, but I’m sure you understand what I mean when I say that that Jeremiah is seized property,” Sam adds. “He’s currently in the custody of Captain America, acting on extension of the Avengers Initiative. As the sole medic on this team, anything and everything you’d like to run on Jerry, here, has to go through me and Steve. I’m not willing to hand over my professional responsibility at any point in time.”

Akbar is silent, but then gestures lightly to one of the benches across from them so that she may sit; Steve nods in permission. She arranges her knees, one over the other. Her shoes are sensible, and Steve can tell that there is a knife hidden in the heel of each. 

“The responsibility of Nick Fury’s primary connection to the MI6 has very recently been given to me,” she begins. “Although SHIELD was American-based organization, it maintained collaborative intelligence and staffing worldwide. Fury’s colleague—my late direct supervisor—was a joint operative, but he perished in the fallout from Triskelion incident. Numerous security breaches, you understand; we only confirmed a successful purge just the other day. As a result, it pains me to admit that our agency is in as much of a shambles as the current state of the American national security complex.” She hasn’t yet addressed their concerns. Steve bristles.

She looks at Jeremiah—for just a second, her face flickers in sorrow, only to be schooled back into rigid calm. “It is of utmost concern that your presence here remains as inconspicuous as possible. I can neither guarantee full security nor full loyalty from my agents. The entire situation is tenuous—our surveillance on internal and international discussion forums regarding the released Triskelion materials indicates that several lines of thought are coming closer and closer to the fact that the boy, and others like him, exist. Public knowledge, at most, is only scant months away. It could even be tomorrow, given the rate at which encrypted files are being unlocked. In the case that it happens during the duration of your stay, we would be unable to provide protection if it was known that you were here.”

“Hydra, through SHIELD, has sowed plenty of bad blood. Trust meant little before, and it means nearly nothing now.” Akbar says. Her fingers are folded neatly upon her lap. There is a small crease in the fabric under one wrist. “There are scores to settle and prizes to win; I’m afraid that out of us all, the boy will lose the most.”

Steve bristles harder, hunching his shoulders over Jeremiah and drawing a shadow of protection. “He’s not a tool to be _seized_ —“

“On an individual basis, perhaps he’s not. Politically, he _is_. You could lose custody to his living relatives, to seizure by the American government. Abduction by any manner of paramilitary or mercenary forces is hardly out of the question. Following the sale of the South African corpse to China, government researchers all over the world have been discreetly attempting to reverse-engineer the version of the serum given to these clones, through samples of tissue China has been selling left and right for the past decade. A living specimen several generations improved, in comparison to the currently circulating genetic material, is worth a fortune.”

Even though Steve knows full well by now that nearly every government in the world had known about the Winter Soldiers, the fact that _nobody_ had made the connection between the mysterious assassins and Bucky’s historically prominent face confounds him. The fact that nobody had thought to mention the Winter Soldiers at _all_ to Steve in the entire time he’d been awake in the future still remains a source of difficult, pinching bitterness. He ignores it. 

“Security organizations worldwide have held long interests in the ghost story of the Winter Soldier, and to discover that the myth is true? There are only two ways this could end, Captain.” 

The whole time, Jeremiah hasn’t moved from where he’s curled up over Sam and Steve’s thighs. He’s still turned inwards, his pale face obscured by his loose hair and the hard line of Sam’s defensive arm laid over his ribs. Two ways, huh? Either way, Steve loses him. It’s _bullshit_ , but Steve’s throat has closed up and he can’t come up with something to say.

The IV bag is only a quarter-full now, and it nags somewhere in the back of Steve’s mind that Jeremiah might be a lot worse-off than he looks. Steve’s been hooked up to enough IV bags in his life to know that any situation where you’d need one isn’t good. It’s a painful thought, skittering and feeling all out-of-place. To comfort himself, he rubs his palm over one of Jeremiah’s knees again, feeling out the dips and bumps of bone under his hand as the same as those he’d wiped clean with handkerchief after a bad scrape on a dusty Brooklyn sidewalk.

Sam breaks the silence with a short bark of incredulous laughter, dry and light. Jeremiah twitches at the sudden sound, and Sam moves his hand from Jeremiah’s back to his head, stroking gently in spite of the fire behind his words. “This is _Steve Rogers_ we’re talking about. You think something like the world gunning at his heels is going to stop him from keeping Jerry safe? Jerry, more than anyone, deserves to live as normal of a life as possible. You honestly think that Captain America would let an innocent victim get thrown to the wolves of the political and military machines, much less a clone of his best friend?” Sam’s gaze remains fixed on Akbar’s the whole time. “And here I thought I liked you for flattering me with ‘Doctor’.” 

Steve releases the breath he hadn’t been aware he’d been holding. Akbar, too, exhales. She rubs a hand over her eyes, and her nails are very short. 

“It isn’t about what I think,” she replies, terse. “It’s about the fact that a section of cryopreserved intact femur was recently sold to Sweden for nearly sixty million USD. A collection of stripped cranial circuitry went for close to a hundred and fifty to a private buyer in Japan less than a year ago. Captain America is a visible icon, and many countries would like to have their own, albeit invisible.” She stares right back, her voice as fierce as it is reserved. “Even your own country tried their hand at recreating you, and their failures have been spectacularly disastrous. Have you forgotten about your own teammate?”

No, Steve hasn’t forgotten about Bruce Banner, or the Hulk, or the recordings of Harlem in ruins. He hasn’t forgotten that as soft as Banner’s hand had been at their first meeting, it had been the same man who had managed to take down an enemy who at the time they’d all thought was one of two most physically powerful creatures on the entire planet. Luckily, that proved to be untrue. 

A squeaking scrape alerts Steve to the fact that Sam has scooched further back in his seat, taking Jeremiah with him. Sam’s face is hard—his jaw is rigid, and a vein flutters like a trapped bird under his chin. He doesn’t look to Steve for confirmation when he states, “That doesn’t change a damn thing.” Sam already knows what Steve would say, and Steve’s heart crumples, a petunia in the night, in his chest at the sheer magnitude of it, of everything. 

Steve doesn’t regret teasing Sam that day in DC, back at the National Mall. At this point in time, he’s not sure where he’d be if he’d been forced to down this path without Natasha stubbornly harpooning herself to him and without Sam following him at every pace practically since the day they met. Shared experiences, all that. 

He still wants to duck away from the bloom of shameful pride, in the pleasure that Sam knows him so well, that Sam believes in him _that_ much despite how it is actually something that Steve would do. He wants to hide, but then again, Steve’s pride has been something he’s gone to confession before, more than once in that bygone, dusty age. 

_Son_ , Father Mulligan had once said on the other side of the screen, _son. There are fights to be fought—there are fights to be won, fights to be lost, and fights that should never come to pass. What is it that compels you to pursue the path you choose? Your motivations behind your actions speak more greatly than your actions themselves do; and if the will behind your word is merely that of your own ego and self-satisfaction, there lies the path of sin. Honor and pride mean little before the eyes of our Lord, and to accept what he has given to you as your birthright is to humble yourself and repent for our natural flaws._

Steve’s never really been as selfless as everyone makes him out to be. It might be the biggest lie the history books have ever held as truth. 

“I haven’t forgotten,” Steve says. “And I don’t care.” 

Akbar watches at him, entirely unreadable.

“I don’t care about what the world thinks—I don’t care about all this, I don’t care about how Hydra’s left everything fucked up and everyone fucked over. I’ll deal with that on its own, but that shit doesn’t factor into what I think is the right thing to do. It doesn’t affect my claim of responsibility over this clone.” Steve looks at Jeremiah, into his big, pale eyes, and maybe it’s just Steve’s enhanced vision or the lighting inside the jet, but he can see his own face reflected in the dark pupils. He looks like a specter that crossed over from some other, wretched place. “We’re just here,” Steve continues, turning back to Akbar, “to rendezvous with Nick Fury and make good on long-term mutual respect. We have information, you have information. We’ve only requested access to materials unrelated to your national security, and are willing to collaborate further with equitable exchange. We’re not here to pry, and it’s not your place to seize anything, or anyone. The Avengers operate under the jurisdiction of the World Security Council, and since replacements have yet to be appointed, we are currently independently neutral.”

Steve shrugs. “If you did, then the MI6 would be at liability for anything that comes up regarding direct involvement with the clone—and if you’ve still got a _shambles_ to work through, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Maybe he’s being too forward, too daring. Maybe he’s ruined everything and it’s going to fall apart and he proves he’s a useless piece of nothing. Steve feels like he’s rumbling into the silence at the depth of suppressed emotion still reverberating in his chest—Jeremiah reaches up with his left hand to touch Steve’s throat, and Steve swallows thickly at the sensation of those cool, slender fingers brushing over his jutting Adam’s apple. “This is a self-contained issue. Hydra may have had its fingers in every pie on every plate, but it grew inside of SHIELD, which grew us. It’s personal. We’re just calling in on a favor.”

The silence grows, until Steve remembers one last thing and blurts, “At no point in time will an attempt be made to remove Jeremiah from the joint custody I share with Wilson, Romanoff, and Barton.” He suspects he actually did just fuck up the moment, because suddenly, Akbar smiles. 

It transforms her face; Steve sees for the first time that she’s only about the same biological age as he is, merely in her late twenties. “You’re quite confident in your ability to handle this situation regardless of what direction it may turn. That’s very audacious declaration to make—but I suppose you did deal with that alien business in New York rather well. Left a mess, but that’s to be expected with something so unprecedented.”

Steve’s just been tested, and he hadn’t a clue. Damn, ok, maybe he’s worse with reading people than he thought. It speaks to how pathetic he is that the thought comes as a resignation rather than a frustration. “The clone—Jeremiah, correct?—is hardly an invader from the further reaches of the galaxy, but if he ever becomes such an issue, you could always call on Thor, couldn’t you? He addressed our, hm, minor problem with that multi-realm convergence we experienced in November of last year. I assume that Tony Stark, as irritating as he is, has plenty of funding for you to pull from for the array of legal cases you will inevitably face. I hope you find yourself fully prepared to undertake such an unconventional parenthood.”

“That’s…true. I think so,” Steve admits. The convergence had taken SHIELD by storm, but it had all been over with so quickly that they hadn’t even been able to send their European-based agents to debrief Erik Selvig before Thor had been found sitting peacefully on Jane Foster’s London balcony with a cup of coffee. Thor had been beaten rather badly, but he had been recovering well—at least, that was what Clint had reported to headquarters before he’d disappeared back into his mission in Italy.

Tony Stark, being a public figure with an ego bigger than the moon, had gone and _died_ and come back from the dead and destroyed a terrorist organization and surgically removed his arc reactor all on his own without SHIELD’s intervention. He had specifically asked to be left alone following the events of New York, but it still boggles Steve’s mind at how easily Stark creates his own problems and manages to solve them in the most explosive and dramatic of ways. Then again, maybe he shouldn’t be so surprised. It’s Howard’s kid, after all. 

Steve hadn’t seen Pepper Potts recently, but she had sent him a personal note following the destruction of the Triskelion. It had been handwritten, on lovely textured paper that Steve would have absolutely pined over back in 1939. It had also been singed at the edges, as if she’d become distracted halfway through and lost her temper at someone pestering her.

The fact that she’d sent the burned letter anyway endears her to Steve. He’s glad, at least, that she’s adjusted to living with Extremis relatively well. He knows what it’s like to have yourself be changed into something indestructible, into something fearful and new and extraordinary. Something powerful, something _useful_ in a way that you weren’t able to be, before—but useful can mean a bunch of things. Not all of them are good, and Steve knows more about that part than he really wants to. 

It takes him a bit to process the last bit of what Akbar had said, but when it sinks in, Steve jolts a little, taken aback. _Parenthood?_ He was just thinking he’d be a guardian, but that’s the same deal, isn’t it? Jeremiah doesn’t need a big brother figure—Steve only knows how to be one peripherally, and dealing with Becca Barnes was probably a very different thing from how dealing with Jeremiah could be. 

Beside him, Sam chuckles, probably at whatever stunned expression is currently on Steve’s face. Sam carefully coaxes Jeremiah up to a sitting position, and hogs him all onto his own lap. “You doing all right, Jer-Bear? All this talk isn’t putting you to sleep again?” 

Jeremiah nods at the first question and shakes his head at the second, and sneaks a peek at Akbar—he blushes again at her gentled expression, and Akbar actually _laughs_ before she grows somber again. “It’s fortunate we’ve been able to come to an understanding. If you don’t mind, we’ll need to take a sample of the fluid in the IV bag to determine what exactly it is.”

“The label indicates that whatever kind of chemical cocktail Jerry’s got, it includes enough sedative to kill a horse.” Sam gives a slow shake of his head. “I’m guessing that his metabolism is similar enough to Steve’s that a regular child’s dose of anything isn’t going to do much for him.” 

When he speaks again, his voice is grim. “I was pararescue—and not the standard kind, by a long shot—and although my type of medical training was extensive, it doesn’t cover this. But I know enough that when an IV bag is labeled with adamantium and vibranium dissolved in solution, there’s got to be something up. There’s also an analgesic that acts as a muscle relaxant and a whole bunch of other things I don’t have comprehensive knowledge of.”

Jeremiah yawns carelessly, cuddling into Sam’s shoulder while poking at the bloodstained white stripes on Steve’s suit. Steve grows cold, so cold; has Jeremiah’s docility and sweet compliance up until now been a direct result of Jeremiah being heavily drugged for the entire time? Steve had thought it had been a product of the upbringing he’d had in the base, but this knowledge leaves Steve grasping at nothing all over again.

“Should we remove the line?” Steve frets, taking Jeremiah’s right hand in his own to run a thumb over the little creases in the palm. The lifelines dip differently than Bucky’s, something that Steve finds oddly reassuring.

“No, we don’t know what could happen. It looks like he’s doing fine, but we’ll just have to wait and see.” Sam pulls up the edge of Jeremiah’s left sleeve to better expose the pale growth of skin crawling down from the shoulder. “Not sure if you’ve noticed yet, but this skin has been spreading since we picked him up. I’d say that it’s grown maybe two inches towards his elbow since you were last awake, Steve.”

Jeremiah shifts and appears as if he’s about to say something; Steve holds a hand up for everyone to wait, and after a few moments, Jeremiah musters up some kind of resolve and raises his left arm without prompting. “My dermal regeneration rate is currently at approximately 1.383 square centimeters an hour.” It’s the most he’s spoken in front of Steve so far, and it comes out as a regurgitation of fact rather than anything natural. He shrinks slightly, being uncertain about speaking out of line; Steve quickly squeezes Jeremiah’s other hand to comfort him, and Jeremiah continues to speak after a brief hesitation. This time, he actually sounds like the sleepy eight year-old boy that he is—granted, a sleepy eight year-old cyborg boy. “I had to have repairs because something was broken, and that made me tired, so my rate got too slow to recover on my own.”

_Broken?_

Absolute fear stabs Steve in the heart so thoroughly he’s pretty sure it stops for a second. _No, no. Please, no._ He exchanges a shaken look with Sam, and from Sam’s face, it’s the first he’s heard of this, too. “And this,” Sam says, carefully touching the central IV line, “is supposed to help you recover faster? Can you tell us anything more about yourself? We want to help you.”

Jeremiah slowly nods, after a short pause during which he glances at Akbar again. It seems that despite how charmed Jeremiah is by her appearance, Akbar hasn’t yet joined the small circle of wholehearted trust in which Steve and Sam belong. “My rate should be normal when the bag is empty.” Jeremiah squirms. “I can grow the rest on my own. I’m getting faster at pulling it in, too.”

Steve has no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but it worries him. “Pulling what in?” Akbar probes, gently. Steve appreciates that she’s careful to maintain her distance, now that she’s noticed how Jeremiah’s comfort is contingent on how close he remains to his bed of thighs. 

“My skin. Like, like this—” Jeremiah braces his back against Sam and tugs his right hand out of Steve’s grasp to wiggle his fingers in the air. At first, nothing happens; then the skin ripples and appears to go liquid, melting away to disappear in-between the joins of the suddenly-revealed metal arm underneath, now identical to Jeremiah’s left. 

Sam is gaping like a fish. Akbar is also gaping like a fish. Steve’s pretty sure he’s doing much of the same. 

Jeremiah looks between all of them, back and forth and to and fro and eventually brings up his bare feet onto Sam’s lap so he can better wrap his arms around his legs. _He’s scared and doesn’t know what to do,_ Steve realizes, the longer he stares at how pale and quiet Jeremiah grows, how tight and small the boy’s trying to make himself. _He’s more scared of us than we are of him._

“I-it’s ok,” Steve stutters. He reaches out and brushes his fingers over the back of Jeremiah’s newly exposed hand plates. “It’s ok, it’s ok.” He bites his lip, because the curiosity is _killing_ him and he has to know. “Is this—is this everywhere? Does it hurt?”

“Almost,” Jeremiah tentatively replies. His hands drop to the bottom hem of his grubby cotton pants and hesitate there before he tugs up the fabric covering up one calf. His leg looks mostly normal, save for a narrow, dark grey band that runs around the circumference of his calf under the knee. It’s got a dull metallic sheen, grading downwards into reddish, inflamed skin that grades further back into a normal complexion at the level of his ankle. “M-my brothers, Beta-37 and 38, they aren’t—w-weren’t—like me. They didn’t have to do any conversions because they were already born that way. I only have my dermal conversion below my knees to finish, because my insides are all done and I don’t remember a lot about when they converted my neural structures but the doctors said they did that already when I was smaller.”

Jeremiah pulls up his pant leg further and rubs at his knee; a little patch of skin sluices away like it had on his arms to briefly expose a shining kneecap before it reforms into perfect, untouched flesh. “It hurts a lot,” he confesses, so quietly Steve _knows_ that it’s something that Jeremiah has rarely been afforded the permission to admit. “But I’m almost done with my repairs _and_ my conversions. I, I was supposed to, to have a checkup in eleven shifts.”

Sam runs his hand through Jeremiah’s hair—an action that makes Jeremiah blink in surprise and subconsciously turn his head into the repetitive, grooming touch. “What kind of checkup? How long are shifts?”

“A routine medical and a testing spar,” Jeremiah says. “It would have been approximately nine-point-four shifts away from now. Shifts are exactly eight hours long.”

“So you’re supposed to be done healing in less than a week?” 

In response to Steve’s question, Jeremiah nods. He doesn’t seem as shy anymore; but that could be because they’re asking him straightforward, simple questions. There are so many questions that Steve wants to ask; where does he even _start?_ How invasive were those exams? What did they entail? How frequently were they scheduled? What the actual fuck is a conversion? If it’s what Steve suspects it to be—then, then how long were the surgeries? How many did Jeremiah undergo? When did they happen? What about his _head and insides?_ And for the repairs, what did Jeremiah mean by broken? What exactly was broken? Why was it so bad that he’d need a metal-rich IV drip? God. _God._

Instead, Steve asks, “Do you—did you like sparring?”

Jeremiah drops the hem of his pants back down and presses his lips together, uncertain again. His gaze slides away from Steve’s face and back down to his feet, where he picks at a bit of dried blood on his heel. “Sometimes.” There’s so much tension in Jeremiah’s little jaw that it shows up through his pudgy babyfat cheeks, but Steve resists the urge to cup them in his hands. Steve might be only slightly—ok, extremely—envious of how Jeremiah is pressed up next to Sam. It’s just slightly too far away for Steve to touch Jeremiah and remind himself that the boy is alive and real.

Something must show on Steve’s face, because Jeremiah gulps at Steve’s expression and quickly forces out something that he probably thinks is what Steve wants to hear. It’s not actually what Steve wants to hear. “I have the best improvement record in my cohort, and I am the fastest, and I don’t bleed as much anymore and I regenerate the fastest too and when I am done converting I will be even faster but I am already almost the strongest.”

He pauses. “I, I _am_ the strongest. Now.”

It’s unknown how many clones are still out there. Steve knows for sure that all of the ones he’d left behind in Khan Tengri were dead, but that doesn’t account for active, adult field operatives left to their own devices around the world, if there are any.

But assuming that there are none left at all—then it’s true, that Jeremiah is the strongest one alive. He might be the only one alive.

Steve doesn’t register that the quinjet has fallen into an uncomfortable silence until Sam breaks it. “Hey, Jer?”

“Yes?”

“When you said that you were hurting…what kind of hurt was it? Inside? Outside? On a scale of one to ten, with one being like lightly pressing a bruise and ten being at the point of losing consciousness, how bad was it?”

“I don’t bruise anymore,” Jeremiah says. Steve presses his own fingers into his thighs to ground himself, because what the _fuck_ does that mean? “It only hurts a little bit now. It hurt more a long time ago.”

“What was the worst?”

It takes a while for Jeremiah to think, but then he timidly tucks down into his knees, his face hidden further by the lank hair dangling down either side of his head. “I think my head was the worst, but I was too young and I don’t remember it very well. But my bones really hurt. The doctors pulled them all out and put them back inside.”

Sam nods, very solemn. “Pulled them out, huh?” Steve has never seen Sam look so pale. 

“I can pull them out myself now, when the doctors ask to look at them. It’s easy, because they’re all done. It’s a one now, less than that? It used to be a ten at first.” Jeremiah props his chin up on his knees and looks between Steve and Sam. “I could—do you want to see?” 

Sam opens his mouth. He closes his mouth. He opens it, closes it, and briefly throws his head back against the wall to produce a tinny thunk. “Oh, no. _No,_ please don’t pull your bones out. Jesus _Christ._ ”

“No? Not even a finger?”

“No fingers, no nothing,” Sam affirms, firmly enough that Jeremiah falters and retreats over onto Steve’s lap; as if Steve’s arms act as both a barrier and a protection. “Ah, wait, I’m not _mad_ —“

Akbar might chuckle a little, but it’s with a very pleasant, fulfilling sense of possessiveness that Steve immediately moves wraps his arms around Jeremiah’s body and duck his head down to rest his cheek on the top of Jeremiah’s head. The satisfaction of knowing that Jeremiah draws some kind of security from Steve’s physical presence through burying his face between Steve’s pectorals trumps whatever self-aware mortification Steve might feel at the fact that his chest now functionally acts as a bosom comfort. 

They sort of let Jeremiah hide there for however long he wants. Sam sighs, but doesn’t reach over to touch Jeremiah. He’s gracious enough to allow Steve a bit of a moment. “What you can do, Jer—it’s not what we can do. You understand? Normally, if a person tries to pull out their own bones, it’s a cause for great medical concern.”

“It would permanently cripple or kill them,” Akbar elaborates, dry. “Outside of certain surgical conditions, anyhow.”

The awkward silence that settles down isn’t so bad as other awkward silences that Steve’s had to sit through in his life. For once, it’s not actually his fault. They sit there and wait for Nat and Clint to come back and all Steve can think about is how terrible his uniform actually is at dulling sensation from the outside. It’s not quite like civilian clothing; Jeremiah’s rubbing his face into Steve’s chest and it’s not as if it’s skin-to-skin, but Steve can still feel enough movement and pressure that he can tell Jeremiah’s making a whole bunch of expressions. Steve leaves him alone; Jeremiah’s probably thinking very hard, but about what?

Their patience is eventually remunerated by a muffled, “I know.” 

There’s so much _there,_ in those two words, that Steve finds himself at a loss to say anything back. He swallows down a surge of hatred for Hydra—because it is, it _is_ hatred, a sick and disgusting tar inside of him that’s feels like it’s been there for so, so long and yet can’t bear to let go—and tries anyway. “I do, too.”

Jeremiah doesn’t look at him. Jeremiah’s hands, one cold and one warm, both covered in shining metal plates, are tucked up on either side of his head against Steve’s chest. “About me?”

“About….death. Dying.” Dimly, Steve realizes that he’s never actually said this out loud, to anyone. “Killing.” It seems absurd, but he’d taken it for granted that everyone he’d ever come in contact with professionally or even personally, nowadays, had at least had some kind of idea about the sorts of awful things Steve’s seen and done. “I don’t like it. But I know about it. I did it. A lot.”

 _There._ Steve’s got Jeremiah’s full attention again, in the form of eyes so wide and so pale, set in a face that’s even paler. “Did you have to?”

Thing is, Steve didn’t. But that’s what you get for being a _self-centered egotistic fathead, you stupid fucker, why the fuck are you here, why did you have to come to, to—you think you have guts? Is that it? You think you’re so gutsy to try and prove yourself by showing up and getting a good look at real guts? Real slimy purple bloody guts full of holes and shoe leather and you got them running out over your hands like rope and eels? Is that the kind of proof that you want to hold up? Steve, you—_

_I’m here because it was the right thing, Buck, and then I heard that—_

_No, mother of god, you had your routine with the pretty girls and if you somehow hadn’t missed me so bad, you were going just let the boys die, huh? Fucking huh? Keep dancing? You’d just leave to tour around London and Paris, who gives a damn about colored folk like Jim and Gabe, really, you know what Monty told me about one of the first things they heard out of your mouth when you broke those jail locks? What does it matter about what you actually think and what you’re actually here for when all that people hear and see you say and do all boils down to, to a complex about your best friend and how much of a man you are—_

_I don’t care what people think, I couldn’t leave you there! I couldn’t—it’s you, if you were—I—Are you asking for a fight?_

_Yeah, you don’t care about what people think. You don’t like those theatre lights, you don’t like that applause. That’s bullshit, Cap. ‘Sides, you wouldn’t sock me, even if I was gearing for one. You’d break my face with your goddamned pinky, and—fuck. I’m done, Steve. I’m done with this fight. Let’s just get going already._

_Bucky, wait—_

_I’m glad, ok? I’m fucking—I’m fucking **thrilled,** I’m fucking over-the-moon that someone came to get me because I didn’t think that anyone would. I’d rather be anywhere else in the world than on that table, and look at where I am now! Not on that table!_

_Buck—_

_But that’s where it ends, got it? You’re stuck here and there’s nothing I can do about that, and so now we’re **both** being eaten alive by bugs in the woods and three hours away from the rendezvous and the moment I let down my guard some crazy kid hiding in the trees is probably going to snipe you through the eye and like hell is that happening. I’ll go lie down on that table again myself before I let that happen._

_I—_

_Steve. Thanks, I mean it. But shut up. I don’t want to hear about it anymore._

“No,” Steve whispers. “But so much has happened since I made that choice that—I don’t know if it was what I was ever meant to do or ever should have done. Some parts of it I don’t regret. Some parts of it I could never regret.” Some parts of it are made entirely up of regret.

Jeremiah is very quiet. “I didn’t have to. Not all the time. I didn’t like it, either.”

“That’s, that’s good.”

But Jeremiah shakes his head and presses his plump baby lips tightly together and refuses to say anything more. So Steve rubs up and down Jeremiah’s bony back and looks between Sam and Akbar with a great thickness winding up in his heart. “I’m sorry,” he chokes out. “I’m sorry that you had to know any of it in the first place. I’m sorry that I—“ Didn’t come sooner? Didn’t save everyone? Didn’t prevent any of this from happening? Was the biggest idiot in Brooklyn?

There is so much that Steve’s sorry for, and if he were to apologize for all of them, he’s not sure who he’d be apologizing to. 

“You know what Steve’s _really_ sorry for?”

Natasha’s voice jerks him out of his miserable thoughts, and he looks up at her, startled. 

Standing at the bottom of the back hatch ramp, she holds up two massive reusable canvas totes in each hand. They’re fit to bursting with paper-wrapped bundles and other smaller plastic bags. “He’s really sorry that he didn’t come shopping with us, that’s what. It was Tony’s treat, not that he knows that I borrowed his card.” She smirks. “Pepper sure does.”

Despite himself, Steve releases a breath that’s shakier with laughter than with what he’d been mulling over. “I could cry.” 

“Careful,” Sam says. He’s leaning over, close enough that if Steve turned his head to face him, their noses would brush. “You might.” One of Sam’s hands comes over to rub over the top of Jeremiah’s head. “Hey. You too, ok? If you’re hurting, don’t hoard it up inside forever. We care about you, and we don’t want you to be unhappy.”

Clint appears in Steve’s line of view, smelling strongly of garlic and also burdened with bags in each hand. He deposits these by Natasha’s feet and pads into the quinjet. “Falcon, Cap. Akbar.” He greets, shifting from foot to foot with a weary restlessness. There’s some sweat on his brow; Natasha’s discreetly leaning against a part of the back hatch supports and taking some weight off of her feet, so they must have been dashing around to get their errands finished. Akbar gives them all a curt nod, wordlessly excusing herself to slip outside with Natasha.

To Jeremiah, Clint asks, “You ever heard the phrase, ‘sharing is caring’?”

Jeremiah shakes his head. “No,” he says. “Should I?” Fear flickers on his face, but it disappears when Clint lifts his hands in appeasement. 

“Ok, well, you know it now. You just got to remember that if you don’t like anything, if it something makes you feel not good even if it’s a minor deal, then you need to tell us, yeah? Anyway, I got you some stuff, but let’s move inside so we can all get cleaned up.” He kneels in front of Steve, opening up his arms in invitation. “I didn’t get to cuddle you yet, so c’mon, kiddo.”

Jeremiah doesn’t budge, and his grip tightens so much that Steve thinks the remaining damp blood soaked into his uniform might get wrung out. Frankly, Steve would be very happy if he didn’t have to let go either, but it’s probably a good idea to get Jeremiah more comfortable with the rest of his team. Right? Steve hopes so. “Jeremy,” Steve murmurs, “Clint’s my friend. We’re just going to go inside the building now, so you can trust him. Let him carry you for a bit.”

Steve hates that the little crease on Jeremiah’s brow doesn’t fade very quickly, but it does, and Jeremiah reluctantly pulls himself away from Steve and reaches for Clint. It takes a couple of grunts and some awkward shuffling, but Clint manages to stand up again with his new bundle, IV bag dangling off of one arm. There’s some measure of relief that Clint doesn’t seem to find Jeremiah too heavy. Steve hasn’t had a lot of experience picking up children and carrying them around so he doesn’t have any idea how much an average boy would weigh at Jeremiah’s age; then again, Sam hadn’t commented about Jeremiah’s weight, either. Even with a good deal of Jeremiah’s body apparently made out of metal beneath that mysterious skin, it doesn’t seem that his overall density is all that different from regular flesh and blood. Steve doesn’t know exactly how that works, but at this way, if they needed to run—at least they wouldn’t be in a situation where the only person capable of carrying Jeremiah with ease would be Steve.

“Whew. Lil’ stinker, you need a bath.” Jeremiah doesn’t reply, but the reservation on his face slowly gives way to fascination in the discovery of the coarse texture of Clint’s jacket. “You like my coat? I picked up one for you just like it.”

Steve takes his shield and helmet out of their nook to strap onto his harness; when he stands, flakes of dried blood fall off of him like gruesome snow. He brushes a little of it off before he picks up a pack that Sam indicates contains all of the seized documents and electronic drives that everyone had been able to grab from the base. It’s hefty, despite how small it seems. As he follows Clint out of the quinjet, he snags Clint’s dropped purchases with his spare hand while Sam grabs their shared duffel of civilian gear—along the way, he passes by Natasha and Akbar, deep in muted conversation.

He manages to catch a snatch of “—thanks for playing along and giving him a dose of grim reality, Mallika. I would have done it myself but he needed a fresh face—“ before he steps out onto the roof of Vauxhall Cross. 

He can’t help it; a lopsided smile sneaks onto his face and doesn’t want to leave. Even after all this time, it puts him at ease to know all the secret ways that Natasha goes out of her way to try and take care of him. There’s a lot about her that Steve still doesn’t know. He might never know everything, but that’s fine. He knows enough to be sure of where they stand together.

Natasha and Akbar wrap up their talk soon enough for Akbar to quickly step up to the front of their group and guide them inside the roof entrance of the building; she leads them directly to an elevator that goes directly down to the basement, where they’re processed through a series of security measures and transfer off to yet another elevator that’s hidden behind a sliding panel.

The secret elevator takes them all the way to the lowest levels of the building. A light brush to Steve’s elbow surprises him from where he’s been staring dully at Jeremiah’s wrists looped around the back of Clint’s neck for the past while; it’s just Natasha, standing to his left and only so tall as his shoulder. She gives Steve’s forearm a squeeze. It hadn’t been pretty, last time they’d gone in an elevator like this.

When the door finally slides open, Steve relaxes marginally once he sees that it’s not Beta-8 waiting there for him. It’s just Fury, wearing nondescript jeans and a hooded sweatshirt under a leather jacket.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“Evening, Captain.”

“Fury.” Steve inclines his head in acknowledgement. Their contact had been limited since April and the dissolution of SHIELD; it had only resumed in earnest after Sam had sent an urgent call to Natasha while he was huddled up in a stolen car with Steve and the twitching corpse of Beta-24. Steve had been left hollow, a wretched howling ringing incessantly between his ears; he doesn’t remember how Sam had manhandled him and what they’d thought was Bucky’s body into the vehicle, or even how Natasha had managed to extract them onto one of Stark’s private jets out of Lebanon and back to the United States.

Since SHIELD had left behind a gaping void of security, the CIA had stepped up and sent an array of ex-SHIELD agents to hustle them into a safehouse while they bagged the body. Steve had struggled—he _does_ remember that he’d punched out one agent and was gearing up to throttle another before Natasha had stepped up between him and Bucky and everyone and said that the Russian file that she’d obtained for him was incomplete.

It was the way she’d said it, the way her eyes were wide and white and her hands clammy, which had convinced Steve to at least sit and listen to her while the agents retreated out of the room to give them some privacy. The Russian-language file on James Buchanan Barnes, the Winter Soldier, had only gone so far as 1978 before it ended abruptly with the statement of _‘Indefinite Storage.’_ At the time, Steve had simply assumed that it meant a return to the cryogenic chamber in preparation for a transfer to the United States.

He was wrong.

Even now, more than a month later, recalling Natasha’s subsequent words is as terrifying and earth-shattering as it was absorbing them the first time. 

_There was something I didn’t tell you, Steve,_ Natasha had said. _I didn’t know it for sure, myself. It was above my clearance, and although I had my suspicions, they weren’t confirmed until now. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Fury has managed to give us some documents, and these—these are—he, Barnes. He wasn’t the only one._

Steve hadn’t comprehended what he’d been told until she handed him a folded sheet of paper, displaying two photocopied pictures side-by-side. They were both of Bucky, with different hair, different wounds, different armor. Different dates, in different decades. The only thing remotely similar about the two pictures was that the two men had the same face as the man draped over Steve’s kneeling lap, and that all three were irrefutably dead.

Sam and Natasha had forced him to clean himself and rest; the following morning had found him in the FBI morgue with Sharon Carter, four files, and the naked body of Beta-24 lying underneath a white sheet that didn’t do enough to disguise how much pain was hidden beneath there.

“You here with me, Rogers?” Fury asks. His slow, deliberate tone helps nudge Steve back from where he’d gone. 

Steve’s acutely aware of everyone doing their best to give him space by diverting their eyes away from where he’s recollecting himself. Only Jeremiah peers at him from over Clint’s shoulder—Steve meets that gaze, a clear stony green under the fluorescent lighting. He swallows. Bucky’s eyes had always fluctuated with the weather, something that he’d only realized after he’d pulled Bucky off of that table in Austria and saw him in true color for the first time in his quarter-century life. 

He’d spent hours wondering how many of Bucky’s whims he’d missed since they were children, when Steve’s motley circus of ailments and purported 'mental illness' of asthma had forced him to center his concentration on getting up the goddamned squeaky stairs to his tenement unit rather than listen to Bucky’s huffs of rippling laughter below him. 

Bucky had always made him go up first, like a dame. Steve had very nearly socked him in stung humiliation that one early time he’d had the nerve to curtsy and sweep his arm up the railing with a _dolls first,_ but Bucky had dropped the chuckle once he’d noticed Steve’s face and said, _I just want to be here to catch you if you stumble._

It’s hard not to reminisce. It’s hard not to linger on the thoughts of the muscles of Bucky’s back and thighs through the fabric, on those rare occasions when Bucky was walking ahead of him. There isn’t exactly a point to those thoughts anymore, is there? Steve could pore over the blurry, discolored images of his pre-war life all day but he’d already done that when he’d been defrosted. It hadn’t made him feel better about waking up in the future at all.

He realizes that he’s keeping everyone waiting, and nods in response to Fury. Fury doesn’t seem convinced, but plows forward regardless. 

“Team. Good to see you all in one piece. I’ve been standing here too long waiting for your sorry asses, so you better multitask and take a walk with me.” He pauses, and purposely gives Jeremiah a good once-over from where Jeremiah’s still curled up in Clint’s arms and looking far more comfortable than he had half an hour ago in the quinjet. Jeremiah looks away from Steve to look at Fury; Fury seems to approve of something he sees in Jeremiah’s face and nods affirmatively. “Good to see he’s doing well, too.”

The walk is hardly strenuous, maybe only the distance of a few standard street blocks, twisting through keycoded doorways and heavy metal barriers that slide noisily into the walls on either side at their passing. Along the way, Fury gives a curt summary of what’s to come. 

Obviously, _Jeremiah._ They have in their custody a clone of a man known as a ghost. The clone is only a child, while the original is dead. Between the decades separating them, numerous assassinations and insurgences have been attributed to the name of the Winter Soldier; it could be generally assumed that these are crimes of shared blood but not of shared consciousness, with full guilt technically falling upon the bureaucratic hierarchy which ordered the development and deployment of each clone. Jeremiah bears absolutely no fault, but his origins and physical alterations are enough to put him in the potential limelight of military, political, and therefore, public scrutiny. While _shit goes down,_ as Fury so aptly puts it, it’s necessary to consider circumstances where the worst occurs.

So, what are their immediate priorities here? Fury lists several possibilities: One, deciphering the information obtained from the Blood Mountain base, which happens to include Jeremiah himself. Fortunately, they have the two reference points of Beta-11 and Beta-15 intensive forensic examinations to help decode the medical notes and better determine how to address Jeremiah’s specific health needs. Of course, since Fury and the rest are all holing up in here at the MI6’s expense, there’s the necessary compromise of sharing everything that they can uncover during their stay—even if the medical documents Sam and the others had seized might provide the key to kickstarting another clone program.

Two, this could also reveal the best way to eliminate the other clones that exist, of those that weren’t in the facility at the time of Beta-8’s procedure. An estimate of mortality needs to be made—although Steve had managed to unsettle Beta-24 enough to shut down Project Insight, the same can’t be said for any of the other clones still running loose in the field under Hydra’s orders. Clones like Beta-13 were entirely unreasonable, and deadly beyond measure. Even with Beta-24’s failing to complete mission parameters due to Steve’s influence, Steve himself had nearly died. Priority here would be identification and categorization of threat level.

Three, elimination. Are these other clones a genuine danger? Could they be neutralized, convinced to leave Hydra’s cause peaceably? Or would death be kinder? If captured, there’s a high risk they would be scapegoated; they’d be at risk for the courts and in the end, be killed and dismantled and abused anyway. Would they be eligible for sanctuary as victims of a twisted scientific initiative, or eligible for mercy kills as the experiments that they technically still are regardless? Given that each subsequent generation of clones is a technological improvement upon the former, at what point did they cease being clones with cybernetic enhancements and become cybernetic human-based expendable weapons? At what point does a violation of scientific morality apply? The subjective and case-by-case nature of this determination means that it’s not something that they can confirm at this exact moment.

Four, Jeremiah again. Running concurrent with other objectives, it needs to be determined what to do with him, once his condition has been stabilized and there’s no risk of sudden aggressions. On one hand, he’s just an eight year-old boy. On the other, he’s the most technologically advanced experimental specimen outside of Hydra’s control, and comparing him to existing records of clones in the 10 or 20-generation might reveal that he’s not as close to a _normal_ eight year-old boy as they could hope for and thus compromise the argument that he should be accorded the equivalent of a normal child’s decent living situation.

Steve immediately rules out anything that would separate them, whether that happens to be laboratory quarantine or logistical termination. He’s so vehement about it that the mousy technician inputting the codes into the cryolab flinches and slips a finger, requiring her to wait the requisite three minutes until she can make another attempt at entry.

“I heard you,” Fury drawls. Steve’s still fuming, but roughly shakes his head to clear it the red haze. Fury’s just positing what could be, not what would be, and that’s—that’s fine. Fury hadn’t said anything yet about his opinion on the matter.

Instead, Fury watches with faint amusement as Jeremiah apparently decides he’s done fiddling with Clint’s jacket and wants to return to Steve. Jeremiah awkwardly clambers out of Clint’s arms to happily settle in Steve’s embrace; Sam and Natasha swoop in to grab Steve’s bags. “I see we’ve already one legal guardian accounted for.”

Steve just breathes Jeremiah in instead of replying. They both of reek of smoke, plaster, and dried blood. He can’t be sure if they smelled worse when they were still damp, but it’s not particularly pleasant either way. Jeremiah is hiding his hot face into Steve’s neck and his hair is on the edge of greasy; it sticks to Steve’s cheek. Clint hands Steve the IV bag, and Steve wordlessly tucks it back into the open zip of his uniform to rest against his undershirt. 

When the waiting period is over, the technician inputs the correct code; as they all step inside the lab, Sam offhandedly remarks, “That makes me _Uncle Sam,_ doesn’t it?” 

The way that Sam says it makes it seem like he was waiting for the proper opportunity to deliver the pun; Natasha snorts as she moves past him and further towards the metal tables in the room, her movements brusque in a way that Steve can tell means that she’d also been sitting on that joke for a long enough that having Sam beat her to it probably stings a little. “That doesn’t make me Betsy Ross. I was born a communist.”

“I guess it does,” Steve says. She stops specifically to glower at him, but her reaction makes him quirk his lips upwards without really thinking. “I meant about Uncle Sam.”

“Now, that’s wonderful news.” Fury shrugs his jacket further over his shoulders in the blast of cold that pours out of the cryolab. “One legal guardian, two uncles, and an aunt. I trust that you’ll make this familial unit work, provided nothing else goes wrong.” 

Natasha shrugs, her lost pun opportunity already cast aside; she dumps the three large bags in her possession along the far wall, but rummages around in one of them to pull out a scratchy-looking blanket that Steve can tell smells like mildew even before Natasha comes up to him and wraps it around Jeremiah. It makes Steve’s nose wrinkle, but Jeremiah doesn’t seem to be bothered. It might be the ugliest blanket that Steve’s ever seen in his life; a lumpy, multicolored thing with an uneven weave and a tasseled fringe clumped together with some mixture of dirt and grime. “It’s temporary,” Natasha assures him, tucking the corners of it into the crooks of Steve’s elbows. “We’ll throw it away once he has an opportunity to get cleaned up, but I was worried that it might be too cold in here with his thin clothes.”

Sam steps closer to take a whiff of it, and immediately pulls back in distaste. “Did you pull this off of a homeless person?” He sets his own bags down next to hers, but eyes them all with great suspicion. “Where did you guys go? What’s even in these?” he asks as he moves towards the lone sink to wash off the dust and blood on his skin.

“I _exchanged_ it. And she wasn’t homeless—she was one of those young backpackers taking a gap year. Clint wanted to pet her three-legged dog. Besides, we passed inspection, stop fussing.”

Akbar murmurs something into Fury’s ear that Steve overhears to be about sending down a medical team, unlocking the forensic archives, and bringing in the retired technicians who performed the first series of autopsies; Fury nods in assent. “We’ll have some assistants arriving soon to help sift through the paperwork,” Akbar announces, before excusing herself out of the cryolab; the lone technician that had been with them since the security check begins pulling relevant paperwork out of locked drawers inset into the walls, shyly gesturing for some organizational assistance.

There are drawers everywhere, filing cabinets and stacks of boxes all around the periphery of the room—there’s no dust, but Steve suspects that the cleanliness is less from continual use and more from the fact that the room is entirely sealed off from the hallway. There must not be many individuals with the research clearance to access this part of the facility. Along one wall, there’s a set of metal doors, barred and locked, with retinal and fingerprint scanners inset alongside. Beyond there must lie the bodies they’re here for.

The thought sobers him. Beta-11 and Beta-15 are long dead, but wasn’t it lonely being locked away? Wasn’t it lonely, lying there, frozen for decades? 

If somebody asked him—and if Steve was inclined to answer—about what he felt about being buried in the Arctic ice, the answer would be simple enough. 

He didn’t feel anything, because he was dead.

But sometimes, when the snow piled up high on the windowsill of his now-abandoned apartment in D.C., when it was dark and he hadn’t had a mission in a few days and he’d just lay there in his bed staring at the whiteness building up outside; sometimes, he’d close his eyes and there would be a great groaning that would echo around the back of his head, rising to a shrieking pitch and yawn—it would crackle and roar and sing in a drone that would last until he awoke hours later soaked through from a terror that he doesn’t recall being awake to experience.

Sometimes, even when he was dead, he’d dream. So he can’t help but wonder if the Betas here dream, too.

Jeremiah shifts against him, and pulls the disgusting blanket in tighter. It _is_ cold in here, isn’t it. Steve starts to rock him back and forth, bouncing a little on his heels like he remembers Bucky doing when one of the twins got fussy; Bucky never let him pick up the twins when they were young, probably because Bucky at ten was much larger than Steve at nine, and the twins used to be fat, restless infants who were difficult to manage even when they weren’t upset about something and prone to flailing in every direction at once. So maybe the only real practice Steve’s ever had with this is when one of the USO girls got her cousin a backstage pass in Topeka—when Marlene had been shamelessly showing him off and then promptly handed him her wailing two year-old nephew. 

Little Frank had thrown up and Steve had nearly dropped him; Marlene’s cousin had blushed and taken the opportunity to rescue her son from Steve’s hapless care, but not before running her hand down the length of Steve’s shoulder to his wrist. 

Jeremiah doesn’t cry or throw up. He just slowly melts into Steve, a gradual sagging relaxation that culminates in a barely-there sigh at the dip of Steve’s throat. Jeremiah’s head starts slipping to the side in small jerking movements, stopping when Steve hoists him up and lets him rest his head more securely on Steve’s shoulder. It’s harder to hold him when he’s limp, and as Steve shifts the majority of the weight here and there to keep Jeremiah secure, he sees Fury make a small gesture to Natasha; Steve pauses in case it might be something important, but it just turns out that Fury’s noticed Jeremiah falling asleep.

While Clint and Sam have chosen to help the technician and are beginning to organize archived material on the desk, Natasha’s in the middle of showing Fury what they’d been able to seize. Although Steve’s been left standing closer to the door, he can still hear them talking in their low voices. 

“He’s adorable, isn’t he?” Natasha whispers, numbering thumbdrives with a permanent marker pen she’d pulled out from somewhere. “First you coo over him while he naps, next you’re going to buy him sweets like the sweet old grandfather you are and tell him to call you Popsy.”

“How could you mistake me for anybody other than the family friend? I’m disappointed.”

Natasha smiles, suppressing humor that makes her shoulders shake. “You mean the crazy uncle,” she teases. “Family friend, crazy uncle, same difference. You and your secret hoard of illegal weaponry stashed away in countless safehouses across the globe.”

“Natasha,” Fury corrects, “of the people in this room, who is the person who sincerely claims the title of _Uncle Sam_ relative to Captain America’s clone of an acclaimed war hero and quintessential patriotic icon? Between the two of us, I am the _family friend._ ”

Clint smothers a wheeze with a series of coughs as he’s setting another stack of files down on the table, but Sam just looks betrayed. Sam pulls a face at him, but Steve can’t help the wince he makes. Natasha reaches across to give Sam a light slap on his chest with a chuckle. “Welcome to the family, crazy uncle.”

“Don’t tell me you have required hazing, because I’m pretty sure jumping out of a collapsing building and into a flying helicopter is enough for any kind of initiation ceremony.”

The soft sounds of muted laughter and lighthearted needling are enough to make Jeremiah rub his face against Steve’s collarbone in order to wipe the sleep from his eyes, so Steve turns his attention away from his team and back to his boy. _His_ boy. It’s very weird to think about Jeremiah in that way, but Steve doesn’t really know how else he can define their relationship, if it even is one. He’s just a guardian, which makes Jeremiah his guardee? It seems too impersonal a term for how deeply Steve feels about him, but if everyone is either claiming the title of uncle or aunt, what does that make Steve?

Jeremiah has been mostly quiet for the entire time they’ve been in the facility’s basement; he looks like he’s doing all right, but it couldn’t hurt to check in. “How are you feeling?” Steve asks. “Are you warm enough? If you’re tired, go ahead and go back to sleep, I’ll take care of you.”

Instead of a reply, all Steve gets is more restlessness. Jeremiah turns his face from side-to-side against Steve’s shoulder, seemingly stuck between which way he wants to be facing as he rests; his knees scratch up and down either side of Steve’s ribs like he’s searching for more purchase. Jeremiah’s upset about something, but Steve doesn’t know what it could be. It could be any number of things. “Jeremy?”

Jeremiah shivers in response to his name and stops struggling. “Empty,” he mumbles, mostly muffled into Steve’s uniform fabric. “My head is too empty. It hurts.”

At first, Steve’s confused—but that soon gives way to a crippling upwell of panic, because he has no idea what to do. 

Urgently, he whispers, “What does that mean?” He can’t help but go tense and tighten his hold; the anxiety’s getting the better of him and his pounding heart can clearly testify. “W-what kind of hurt? Is it bad? Is there anything I can do?”

There’s a sniffle. Then there’s another, and another, and quickly enough Jeremiah’s whimpering in earnest, wet and sticky and clinging to Steve so intensely that the fabric starts to tear under his metal fingers. “No—no, I, I want—I want my brothers.”

The others have frozen by the table, gone all quiet and alert in case the situation escalates. Steve looks from Jeremiah to them and back again, frantically hoping that it doesn’t. “You have me,” Steve splutters. If it comes out a little desperate, well, Steve kind of is. “You have us. And we’ll, we’ll be looking for them. The others who are still out there.” 

Instead of being comforting, the words only serve to make Jeremiah more upset; Steve can tell because big fat tears well up on Jeremiah’s bottom eyelid and quiver there until crumply blinking send them on a direct course down the sides of Jeremiah’s nose and into the corners of Jeremiah’s lips, puddling with the drool and snot into an absolute mess by the time it reaches the cleft of the chin. Bucky only ever had two modes of crying, both of which Steve had always thought were absurd; it was either that Bucky wept solemnly, beautifully, like a statue so moved it had come to life—or he was the ugliest goddamn thing outside of a rotting seagull somebody had stepped on, less of a statue and more of a sodden balled-up newspaper. It was almost admirable; Bucky was nearly always admirable even when he wasn’t, and despite how many times in the past Steve had tried to spite himself into thinking otherwise, for the sake of _believing_ otherwise, because he definitively knew otherwise, it was something that Steve suspected that he would never be able to fully shake.

Steve remembers Bucky being on a perpetual even keel; in comparison to Steve, whose stubborn pride, fitful temper, and high spirits gave him no end to trouble, Bucky always managed to keep a cool head even relative to the other boys of the neighborhood. Bucky was sharp, clever, studious, wicked in humor and efficient in stride but bore an undercurrent of compassion that had driven him to fight off Steve’s assailants on the day that they’d met as children. He’d been almost ruthlessly pragmatic, but he made so many exceptions out of his affection for Steve that he might as well have been a right fool. At least, he’d been Steve’s fool, his best friend, dearest—only—companion, his brother in all but blood.

That was too much of a good thing, maybe. Bucky could be cold. Not on purpose, not back in Brooklyn; something changed in Europe. Bucky could rationalize—could compartmentalize, could talk about terrible things with the worst of them, in the worst of ways. Perhaps it was even more awful how Bucky had been resolute about applying that same methodology to himself; Bucky had so many secrets that it might have not been wholly right to call him _Bucky _anymore.__

When they had reunited, Bucky had been somber in a way that he hadn’t been, before. Not once had he spoken to Steve about what had occurred in Austria, no matter how many times over those two years after that Steve had presented the opportunity to share, without judgment. They were brothers, weren’t they? What use were secrets between them? It’s an intensely hypocritical desire that makes Steve grimace in a low-burning shame.

Steve had seen the room, seen the table with the puddled urine and blood beneath, smelled the chemical-and-sweat stench of Bucky, entirely blanketed by the heavy electric tang of the barbed machine hovering above him. Steve had seen the desk with the pens and books, the filing cabinets set all around scattered equipment that he’d recognized from the hospital where his mother had once worked; scalpels, pliers, needles, scissors, pins, wastebaskets of soiled gauze. 

Of this, Bucky told him nothing. He said nothing about how the room he’d been tormented in was also an office—a showroom, an operating theater, a place of discussion and business. It had borne that map of Hydra bases upon the wall; there had been officials who had congregated there to make use of the records and paperwork, all while Bucky had screamed and shat and pissed and puked enough to leave a stain on the floor.

Of this, Bucky had told Steve abso-fucking-lutely nothing. At night, he curled up in his bedroll with his back to Steve in their tent and if his breathing became irregular at times, he never rolled over and confided his terrors. Steve had, he’d wanted, oh, he’d—he’d wanted so much just to grab Bucky, grab him and force him to face Steve and just fucking _spill it._ They’d known each other forever, they had known everything about each other; but then Steve would remember that he had denied and refuted and defended and _lied_ straight to Bucky’s face about what he’d done that day at the StarkExpo, about how he’d signed himself up to be literally larger than his miserable little life.

He’d had a secret, and it had changed him irreversibly. He had simultaneously saved his friend and given him the shock and betrayal of his young life. Steve could respect Bucky’s wishes to do the same, even if it ran as a constant undercurrent of unwelcome distance under his heart. 

The only time Steve had ever heard him scream, really scream, was when they’d been ripped from each other on that accursed train. It makes him want to laugh himself into sick tears, all over again. It had been the last time he’d seen Bucky alive. Thinking about Bucky in those terms, with a child bearing Bucky’s face in his arms, a child who is very clearly struggling not to cry on Steve’s bicep—it’s more disorienting than most things Steve’s had to face. 

“They’re not the same,” Jeremiah cries, barely audible—but something stops him from saying more; he bites his lip so hard it goes white and mashes his face into Steve’s neck, halting Steve’s meandering thoughts and effectively ending their conversation even though Jeremiah continues to shiver and shake. 

Steve shoots a pleading look at his team for help; Natasha peels away from her labeling duties before Sam can put down his armful of papers and comes over, tutting gently. “Sweetheart, you want to tell Auntie Nat what’s wrong? Steve is stupid, I know.”

Steve’s too worried to be offended, because the remark prompts Jeremiah to pull his face out of the wet spot he’s made and weepily reply, “But that’s subjective.”

For an eight year-old child created as a part of a literally-underground immoral scientific initiative, Jeremiah is oddly well-adjusted; perhaps too much to ever be mistaken for an average boy of the same age. The level at which he appears to understand and use language keeps changing, complicating any kind of general assessment of his mental age even if Steve’s aware of how unreliably verbal fluency directly correlates to the current state of a mind. Steve had assumed that Jeremiah was around eight, that’s true, but between being shy and clingy like a much younger child and then little things like _this _—Steve doesn’t know what to think. It’s very confusing.__

So, Steve just stands there feeling as awkward as hell, still rubbing circles with his palm over Jeremiah’s back under the ratty blanket; It takes a few minutes of prompting and reassurance, but Natasha coaxes Jeremiah out of crying and into intermittent snuffling with the power of pointless and nonsensical argument, which Steve hadn’t expected to work as effectively as it does.

Natasha reaches up to smooth Jeremiah’s hair out of his face at the same time that she smoothly says, “No, intelligence is inversely proportional to brain size, which is why Steve is as smart as a rock and I am a genius.”

“But that is relative,” Jeremiah replies. His voice is still nasally, but it’s clearing fast. “And your heads are very nearly the same size, and mine is much smaller, which makes you also stupid and me more genius.”

“That’s true, but am I wrong? I could be right. If I did a handstand, more blood would flow to my brain, which would make it swell up and turn me into an idiot if I did it for long enough. Then I would explode.”

Fearful confusion flits over Jeremiah’s face, enough that his growing indignation starts to flag. “No? Temporarily? You wouldn’t—explode? Explosions?” He turns his face to Steve, because even if Steve is as smart as a rock—which is not very—maybe Steve knows the answer anyway. 

“I don’t have a clue,” Steve confesses. He’s seen people explode before, but definitely not from doing handstands. “Probably not. I think.”

The instant horror on Jeremiah’s face makes Steve regret everything he has ever done in his life that led up to this exact moment; he goes lightheaded from how quickly the blood drains away from his head in reflective dismay. Jeremiah’s lips start wobbling and his eyes well up and Natasha glowers at Steve before planting a kiss on one grubby baby cheek. “Jerry, Auntie Nat was lying through her teeth, don’t cry. Handstands don’t make people explode.”

“But your mouth was open!”

“English has a lot of casual idioms that you might not know yet—“ 

Suddenly, Jeremiah’s speaking in Russian—in short, clipped phrases that are so dialectally flat he could have been raised in a state-controlled news station. To her credit, Natasha doesn’t so much as blink when she switches, too. Steve hasn’t heard her speak in her birth language before, but there’s something extremely uncomfortable about realizing that her accent, as well, has a profound placelessness which removes any hint as to where Natasha herself could be from.

Steve doesn’t speak much Russian himself, but he’s not too bad in listening and reading. He could write in a pinch. Natasha’s told him before that he sounds abysmal, but she’d sometimes whisper an old joke to him that he wouldn’t fully understand until she sighed at his blank face and gave him enough cultural and linguistic context to realize it was actually a joke and not the one-off peculiar phrase that had stumped him at first.

It’s something that came with the serum. Not the actual language implanted into his mind, but the ability to learn and retain knowledge at such speed, ease, and capacity that it’s as much of a curse as it is a blessing. With the advent of his nightmares after he’d awoken in the modern age, he’d been cursed with memories that refused to fade. It doesn’t matter whether or not he practices it; the only thing that degrades is the speed at which he can recollect, not the quality of what’s already imbedded there.

Nowadays, Steve doesn’t use his enhanced mind specifically for language acquisition—it comes quickly enough through peripheral familiarity—but it feels more like he’s using most of this ability to translate through the slang and vocabulary and everything of this new age and filtering it back to the part of his mind that had been preserved as a picture-perfect smudge inside the echo of somebody much, much smaller. 

He remembers his childhood the same way he always had; in patches of muddied colors blurred together by his own terrible vision and obfuscated further by his partial deafness—all broken up in time and space by the occasional sickness that would take hours and days away from him through fever and exhausted slumber. 

It’s not like the serum had retroactively corrected the memories of his youth into vivid technicolor and surround-sound. As fuzzy as the oldest ones might be, at least Steve knows that they won’t ever get fuzzier. There’s no point in dwelling in the past, no matter how seductive the sepia fog of it sometimes becomes. The past isn’t where he is, it’s not what he is, it’s not what he’ll ever be again. It’s certainly not the soggy and upset boy he’s holding in his arms at this very moment.

Speaking in Russian seems to put Jeremiah at slight ease, probably because Russian was the universal language of the mountain base; over at the table, the lone technician Akbar had left in the cryolab with them is busy calling up an additional translator through a wall panel; Steve can see Sam mouthing to Clint something about knowing _Dari, Pashtun, and Arabic, but the Cold War’s been over long enough that there wasn’t a need for me to pick up Russian in Afghanistan_ while Clint sifts through Sam’s stack of documents to separate them by language.

By the time Natasha’s managed to get Jeremiah to wind down— _no, no heads are going to explode, I’ll say that in a dozen more tongues if you want me to_ —Akbar’s medical team and four more technicians finally arrive and give brief introductions before splitting up to do their work. Jeremiah gives one last disgruntled sniffle and turns his attention to the medics hovering at Steve’s periphery. Natasha leaves a gentle pat on Jeremiah’s back, leveling Steve this _look_ that leaves him baffled, because Steve only really understands about half of all the looks Natasha sends his way. Is it her face? Is it just her bearing? Steve never has much of a problem with any of the other faces people make at him, so it could just be that Natasha always picks the weird looks to give him.

Steve grimaces at her. “It’s ok,” Steve says to Jeremiah. “They just need to make sure you’re ok.”

“I’m—I’m _ok,_ ” Jeremiah croaks. “Ok?” He seems to be testing it out. It seems like he hasn’t used this word before, and it shows in how slowly his mouth forms around the syllables. 

What’s not ok is when the medics indicate for Jeremiah and Steve to separate; Jeremiah immediately looks to Steve for confirmation, but his pale, tight face says all that Steve needs to know.

“No,” Steve says, so instead he seats himself on one of the rickety metal stools provided, with Jeremiah sitting crosswise on his lap. Sam meets his eyes, but before he can come over, Steve shakes his head and cooperates with the medics trying to undo the top fastenings of his suit to pull out the IV bag and examine Steve’s wounded shoulder. _It’s fine,_ he mouths. _They’ll handle it._ Sam frowns something at him that Steve takes to mean _fuck you, I’ll look at it later anyway._ It makes Steve feel better about all these strangers gently cleaning his raw skin with antiseptic wipes. 

The medics whisper between themselves and prod him, carefully; Steve can understand their fascination, even if he’s far too jaded by being at the poked side of a medical examination more often than not. It’s been less than half a day since he’d been stabbed to the hilt by a large, partially serrated blade in circumstances of great violence and the only thing that indicates that that ever happened is a puffy, reddened line where his flesh has already sealed up. He explains to them that the swelling is normal—that’s just his serum-enhanced body overreacting during the initial healing process—and that he’ll have a mark for the next day or so while his body transitions to superficial repairs and pushes out any debris that may have gotten stuck inside when the knife had torn through his uniform fabric. 

In less than a week, it’ll be like it never happened at all. No scars, no irreversible damage, no residual phantom pain, no nothing. The only thing that would remain would be Steve’s memory of it; it’s just his luck that his brain prevents him from ever forgetting it. 

The medics still tape the puffy tissue over with a little gauze pad to prevent further irritation in case it chafes against the brush of his clothing. It’s very polite of them. They’re also very polite when requesting access to Jeremiah; although they ask Steve, as the guardian, if they can examine Jeremiah, they also ask Jeremiah himself if he could put the blanket away and remove his shirt.

Jeremiah does so, reluctantly—but he holds very still while they take detailed measurements of his body and photographs of his plated arms. The skin-metal interface of his shoulders is a point of great interest, and one medic tentatively brushes a gloved finger over Jeremiah’s right shoulder, earning a reflexive ripple of the fluid skin; the little patch that had been touched retreats slightly and hints that Jeremiah’s plating goes as far as his collarbone and pectoral area—and most likely, even further than that.

Eerily, the way the organic metal gleams and knits together so perfectly is almost analogous to the structure of the Asgardian Destroyer. Steve had been given more comprehensive files on his fellow Avengers after the incident with the Chitauri—although Natasha’s and Clint’s had been mostly classified for their own security, he’d been able to read up on Stark, Banner, and Thor. 

The remains of the Destroyer are probably squirreled away somewhere in another SHIELD base, if Thor hadn’t at some point returned to reclaim the alien debris. Steve suspects that there’s some degree of overlap regarding some of SHIELD’s Tesseract-derived weapons and the Destroyer’s technology; after all, Howard had found the Tesseract during his lifespan, and SHIELD had been in possession of the Destroyer since 2011. It wasn’t long after that Steve had been discovered, but a span of a few months is plenty of time to start researching and building.

It’s hardly unlikely that Hydra didn’t make use of the Destroyer when improving the blueprint for subsequent generations of cybernetic endoskeleton.

Steve suppresses a shiver. The archived footage had shown the Destroyer glowing with hellish internal light; the prickle of unease that scratches over his shoulders at the thought of Jeremiah opening his eyes to look at Steve with that same unearthly, inhuman fire isn’t small.

The medics mutter amongst themselves, and one of them hands Jeremiah a wrapped lollypop for his good behavior. Without looking to Steve for confirmation, Jeremiah immediately takes off the wrapper and puts the blue candy into his mouth. His lips happily pucker around the paper stick, wet and pink. _Huh,_ Steve thinks, surprised. _Who fed him candy before?_

When the IV bag, now hung up on a wheeled pole, is empty, the medics delicately remove the needle; there’s no pinprick left behind, since Jeremiah’s biosynthetic skin closes up the hole immediately. But, with Jeremiah’s shirt off, some of the equipment that they’ve brought with them into the cryolab makes Steve bristle. He suspects that the tray of tools are mostly there as a precaution—the only use they’d have for pliers was if Steve’s wounds had been bad enough to warrant pulling pieces of junk out of him. Morita always griped that he used the pliers in his toolkit less for repairs to their gear and more for pulling shrapnel out of the _good ol’ Captain, why’d you have to go and get squished by a building again? You do this again and Barnes is going to rip you up like he caught you sleeping with his gal._

_Sorry—ow, stop digging so much, it’ll come out on its own—Jim. But it’s just my luck that Bucky doesn’t have a girl back home, just his ma and his sister._

_It’s like you’re telling me I shouldn’t bother to wash these clean since I’ll just get your blood all over them again, huh._

_I—maybe._

_You’re a piece of work, you know that?_

_Bucky sure does, he’s not gonna rip me._

_You must have saved his life a million times in a million other past lives for him to put up with you being this way. I sure as hell don’t know why the rest of us stick around, hah!_

_To end this war?_

_It’s more like we just want to go home, but yeah, that’s close enough. There’s your fellow man, and then there’s Barnes, and if you’re something else, well. So’s he. You sure make the pair._

Still, Steve doesn’t like seeing that scalpel there. A medic bumps the handle with a finger when reaching for some more gauze, and Steve snarls reflexively. No more needles. No more knives, sample vials, tweezers. They can have pictures and measurements, they can analyze the IV bag all they want for bodily fluids, but he’s done with this part of Jeremiah’s life; under his watch, Jeremiah’s never going to be an experimental subject again. 

Steve diverts the rest of the medics’ entirely benign efforts to the extent that Fury eventually looks up from where he’s examining the papers strewn over the table and says, “Just let them do their job, Cap—“

“Their _job?_ And what does that entail?” Steve knows exactly what it entails. His mother was a nurse in the TB ward and fuck, who knows how many times he’d been admitted to the hospital on the verge of death? With Steve’s cocktail of strange malaises, it entailed lying helpless and in pain, a miserable subject more so than a needy patient. 

He was sick of it then and sick of it now. He’s sick about his own medical and injury record being four encyclopedia volumes thick and locked away inside what could only be described as the nesting doll of safes. He doesn’t want anyone to look at Jeremiah in the same way—as a monster of science. 

He knows he’s being unreasonable. The others had heard the real-time audio of the basement levels of the Hydra base, but Steve’s not sure they’ve seen the video that goes along with it. He doesn’t know if they saw the green-glowing glass capsules with the floating flesh, or the rows of cribs with their wires and tubes and needling machines. He’s being irrational and paranoid and he’s got a full damn right to be. 

“Let us,” Natasha interrupts, pulling away from her duties yet again to return to Steve’s side, this time with Clint in tow. She carefully steps between Steve and the medics, shielding his tight face from their view. More quietly, she says to him, “I don’t know how many of the Triskelion files you read, or how many of them were _mine,_ but I know a thing or two about neat little children in neat little uniforms and neat little rows. Maybe less so about cyborgs and clones, but here?” She taps her temple. “I think I might as well have been the same.”

Steve would trust her with his life. Now, anyway. It’s almost strange, but he’s worked with her for long enough that he knows what the next thing she says is before she actually says it. He wouldn’t have figured that a part of her could have ever become so familiar as to become predictable. “Would you trust me with him?”

“Yeah.” He swallows thickly when he has to pass Jeremiah over to Clint, who claps Steve’s bicep in reassurance.

“Nobody’s going to hurt a hair on his head, Captain,” Clint states. “I’ll be the cool uncle.”

It’s halting, but Steve manages to huff out a pathetic laugh. Natasha’s expression informs him that his plastered grimace is not a subterfuge mission-worthy smile. “Isn’t that interchangeable with ‘reckless uncle?’” 

The granite-set heavy frown Steve gets in return makes him feel much better. “No. Not for this kid.” How long has it been since somebody’s looked at him with General Phillip’s precisely slumped, misshapen disapproval? Too long. It used to be that disappointment and pity had stirred in Steve a good deal of bitterness, self-spite—but now, it just reminds him that he hasn’t changed that much after all. He’s still Steve Rogers, a scrappy dumbass from Brooklyn. He still exists, even if Brooklyn itself as he’d known it doesn’t.

“Good.” He lets Clint and Nat take things over—Jeremiah makes a soft sound of complaint, but doesn’t resist being separated from Steve—and tears himself away to stare at the autopsy reports and assorted records of Beta-11 and Beta-15 on the table with Fury and Sam.

Fury, though, points at Steve, then points to a nearby sink and some paper towels. Steve gets it, he’s filthy, _fine. **Fine.**_ He takes a short detour over to the station and unbuckles his helmet to drop it on the counter, and slings off his shield to prop it up against the wall. He then pulls off his gloves, which crackle and shed flakes of who-knows-what to flutter down to the drain. He splashes his face. The water that drips away is a murky, opaque reddish brown, so Steve keeps scrubbing until the water runs clear. 

There’s a container of foaming soap, so he uses that and shoves his head underneath the high tap. It’s so cold that it takes his breath away, and the water that he tastes when it runs into his mouth reminds him of when he’d gotten his face shoved into an icy puddle in the 8th grade. Maybe the pipes pull their water out of the Thames. He grabs a paper towel when he’s done, and cursorily rubs it over his hair before he tosses it into the wastebasket and reaches for another handful to wipe his hands and face dry—these dampened towels he uses to get the worst of the clumped gore and blood off of his uniform, so he dumps them into the biohazard bin sitting on the counter.

He washes his hands again. He checks under his nails, goes in-between his fingers to clean the webbing. He scrubs for exactly a minute, like his mother taught him to. Steve usually doesn’t bother scrubbing so long, not anymore, but here-and-now, it feels like it’s something he has to do.

When he pads back, Sam quietly taps him towards one end of the table, where Steve assumes that he’ll begin reading in chronological order from the MI6 files.

There are a few highly censored reports about the circumstances behind the acquisition of the bodies, but the rest are forensic and medical in nature: they detail dissections; attempts at reanimation; stress-testing of purely biological, cybernetic, and purely mechanical physical components; experiments regarding test-tube tissue cultivation. There are three entire briefcases worth of papers and folders and debriefs simply recording the _differences_ between the two clones, the whole mess of it all presented in a grisly black and white. 

Steve clenches his hands on the corner of the table so hard that the metal crunches and groans under the pressure, folding upon itself in beat to the dull ache he feels at his temples. Fury meets his eyes in warning—ah, that’s right. The things you’d do for national security. 

The papers from the ‘70s look just about the same as the ones that Steve’s team had seized less than a day prior. The pictures are in color and the paper is bright and white, not yellow with age. He wonders how much has changed, and how much hasn’t.

He wonders how much of this Alexander Pierce had known. 

But, Pierce is dead. The man got a bullet right in the heart and for his treachery, was fished out of the rubble and given a funeral with full honors. He had, after all, served his country. He had solved problems, plenty, but had he done so in the right way? The true way? 

It disturbs Steve how many would argue that _yes, he had._

Steve knows where he stands. He’d had moments where he’d been unsure about his purpose, his pursuits, his ultimate objectives—even his reasons, and the nature of the person behind them. But, there’s freedom, and then there’s fear and the control, paranoia, and preventative measures that go with that fear. The universal facelessness of it turns the late Secretary to the World Council into nothing but one tiny mask on the millions of facets that made up Hydra, entwined so organically into the motives of national securities over the past seventy years that it had become impossible to separate the concepts of _security_ from _control_ in the forms that they currently existed.

Would the Betas have been created as _preventative measures?_ Or as a means to resolve _security_ through _control?_ Steve looks at the grey fall of Beta-15’s black lashes on the white canvas of that forever-familiar cheek, immortalized in a photocopy of a photograph since the time of death, twenty-six minutes after o-four hours on April second, the year of the lord nineteen-seventy-eight. Beta-15 lies back against what Steve thinks is a concrete wall beneath the splatters of black, his broad chest a broken-open mess. Steve reads that _the intruder, rather than detonating the device within his body when he was in the presence of six of our highest operatives, killed them by hand and removed the device himself afterwards to plant deep within the foundations of the building. We were beyond fortunate to have found and disabled the device before it was detonated; in the intruder’s weakened state, we were unable to retrieve him alive._

He looks away from this, and looks instead at Sam. The dull pain that presses down upon his heart eases at Sam’s presence, even if Sam isn’t looking back. 

Oblivious to Steve’s stare, Sam rummages through an impressive pile of thumb drives, hard drives, floppy disks, and CD-roms that he, Nat, and Clint had managed to seize on the upper floors before the collapse of the base. There are boxes and boxes and boxes of archived experiment footage from the ‘80s and ‘90s for the MI6’s Beta analyses. They’re already neatly labeled, but there are so many that Steve doesn’t know how long it’ll take them to sift through everything that the MI6 has available for their use.

It’s at this time that Akbar returns with an additional translator. She’s holding an old, bronze key; this, she places on the edge of the table before departing again. “I trust things are going well, so far? When you feel sufficiently prepared, we have an old archival library prepared for the examination and viewing of classified documents. It’s a lounge, of sorts, which is intensely tasteless regarding the subject at hand, but convenient for your purposes. You’re welcome to settle there at any time, and we will assist you in moving the requisite material if need be.”

After she leaves, Sam says, “Who the hell turns an archival library for autopsy reports into a lounge?”

“The British, obviously.”

Fury and Sam’s exchange seems to filter right by Steve’s head; he looks over to where Clint and Natasha appear to be surrounded by an army of sensors and clipboards. They seem all right. Jeremiah seems all right. He trusts them. He trusts them?

He trusts them, he trusts them, _he trusts them—_

“Steve.”

He looks up to see Sam offering him a paper takeout container of butter chicken and rice out of one of the bags Clint brought into the room. Steve’s not too familiar with Indian cuisine, but the food’s still warm and his heightened sense of smell makes his mouth water at the promise of something filling and heavy in his gut. 

“We’re probably not supposed to eat in here,” Sam continues. “This is also the worst reading material imaginable to eat over, but you look like you’re going to pass out on me. Please. ”

Steve takes the tray without really thinking about it. He’s eaten over worse things, relatively speaking. As Sam passes over a fork and a napkin, their fingers brush and Steve’s eyes flicker to Sam’s—they’re clear and dark, like an unending pillar of basalt to keep him steady. The sensation of Sam’s soft, dry skin lingers on Steve’s hand for what seems like hours, and keeps him grounded from sinking under into the images of hell before him, the hell that lies buried beneath Blood Mountain. He turns his mind away from thoughts of hell and stuffs his face and doesn’t look at the papers or at Sam, but still; the thoughts persists and his face is hot and growing hotter and he can’t breathe, but then, into the turmoil, Sam wraps a hand around the wrist that leads to Steve’s fork. “Easy, tiger. Breathe with me?”

In, out. Steve swallows. In, out. Another forkful. Chew. In, out, swallow. Steve’s heart stops beating quite so fast, but his blooming face doesn’t settle down as quickly. 

“Better?”

Steve nods. He turns his face down into his rice and lets the last shudder work through him before he takes another bite. It tastes good on his tongue. The hand that Sam leaves on his back feels better.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Soon enough, the medics wrap up and shuffle out in single file; after that, Steve reclaims Jeremiah from Clint and it’s all quiet in the lab while the five of them and the techs sift through take-out and papers. Jeremiah flutters in and out of bored sleep, shirtless but bundled back up in his disgusting blanket. 

His weight is an anchor of comfort in Steve’s arms, but even when Steve spreads his palm over Jeremiah’s back where the heart should be, Steve can’t be entirely sure whether or not he can sense a pulse. He’s sure that he’d felt one before, if not necessarily from Jeremiah’s heart. Nat had informed him that beyond the extraordinarily bizarre standard of health the doctors had to assume, Jeremiah had seemed fine. The boy shifts from time to time, rubbing his grubby cheeks on Steve’s neck and peering down at the images of his prior, deceased iterations. 

Occasionally, he even says something in response to a muted comment by Fury or rhetorical question from Clint. Jeremiah doesn’t offer any assistance in interpreting the evidence, but when Sam carefully asks him a question about a strange attachment found on the right femur of both Beta-11 and Beta 15, Jeremiah stares at him in uncertainty until Natasha rephrases it in Russian—Jeremiah answers immediately in the same language. He responds to her order and keeps talking with prompting, supplying information on everything within his plane of view that lies within his range of knowledge; he does so readily, bright and eager to please. 

It’s so much to process that Natasha ultimately has to tell him to stop. When she does so, Jeremiah obeys her and subtly braces himself against Steve in a way that Steve recognizes intimately—it’s a defense against a sharp blow or a sharp word.

“You’ve done nothing wrong,” Steve says. He cranes his neck down, tries to envelop Jeremiah in the soft tones of his voice. “You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to.”

Despite Jeremiah’s acceptance of Steve’s inner circle, it’s clearly Steve whom he favors most, trusts most. “I was ordered to,” he replies. It’s so quiet that only Steve could have heard him, the words communicated more through the vibrations generated by the air passing through Jeremiah’s throat and the movement of his lips on Steve’s skin. Steve doesn’t let on that he’s taken aback by the sudden switch to this secret tongue, and forges on through the same means of communication.

He hums, low in his throat, preparing to respond in kind. The others watch them, wary. Steve blinks once, twice; they reluctantly return to work and leave Steve alone in conversation. Steve moves away a few paces to give himself and Jeremiah the illusion of privacy. “Did you want to?”

“I was given an order.”

“Whose orders?”

Silence. Jeremiah is very still, but he’s clearly thinking hard enough that Steve almost hears whirring. There might actually be whirring, but Steve’ll be damned if anyone dares to open up Jeremiah’s head to check. 

It’s a double-edged question, and Steve’s starting to feel pretty awful about it, shoving something like this on a kid who can’t possibly give a straight, objective answer. How aware was Jeremiah of who created him? His origins, his intended purpose? How much space was he given to develop his own sense of self? Of the few freedoms Jeremiah must have had, what were they? Did he ever view his birthplace as a cage, a prison, a novel captivity? Was it just… _home?_ Does he even have a concept of home? Steve doesn’t even remotely know where to start, but he tries to rephrase his prior question into something more direct, something closer to what Jeremiah would be comfortable answering. “Why do you think Natasha, instead of Sam or me, is giving you orders?”

“Because she talks like the handlers talk,” Jeremiah says. “The handlers, and the guards, and the trainers and instructors and technicians and doctors. The only people who speak English are in simulations, or they are not of authority.”

“You only spoke Russian there? Nobody spoke another language?”

“We practiced in other languages, with some instructors. I am programmed with thirty-two, but I have to practice them all for colloquial fluency.”

 _Programmed with thirty-two?_ “W-what about ranks? Who had authority over who? Over you?”

“Betas ranked higher than me, in sequence,” Jeremiah says. “But all Betas are under authority of our handlers, and then there are the other people.” He pauses, apparently uncertain about who was actually the most responsible in the base. “Technicians and doctors are the same, I think, but if they’re together I obey the doctors first. And Alpha.”

The fact that Jeremiah ranks _Bucky_ as highest rips up Steve’s next words into a jumbled knot of bitter, tumbling slurry at the back of his throat, surging and lonely. Yet, how could that be? How could Alpha be the highest ranked if he was dead?

It takes a bit to recollect himself enough to rumble out another question. “In Basement Level 21, where we found Alpha, was that the first time you saw him?”

“No.”

“No?”

Jeremiah falters, like he’s confronted with an onset of memories that he hadn’t particularly enjoyed developing. “When I was under my first conversions, my tissue didn’t adapt well. They had to implant Alpha-standard bone to stop me from regressing back to my normal bone.”

“Who’s _they?_ Who decided that?”

Steve can tell that although Jeremiah is uncomfortable with the subject matter, he answers anyway, hiding his face back into the soft dip of Steve’s throat at the jugular vein. “The doctors. But the, the doctors who worked with Alpha didn’t like it.” Here, the timbre of Jeremiah’s speech changes to something lower, something that horribly resembles the kinds of voices Steve used to hear at routine meetings with the office staff at the Triskelion, the kinds of voices that went hand-in-hand with that of the elderly man who had once turned down a Nobel prize. “The technicians working on me said that ‘they had already invested too much into this model to deconstruct it and apply the components elsewhere.’” Jeremiah shrugs and rubs his sticky face deeper into Steve’s neck. “It was only a bone marrow implant into my spine and a little bit of blood, but Alpha’s doctors, they were saving his special tissue and got mad because they had to use up some on me.”

It. Jeremiah had never been anything other than an object, a weapon, a tool—at least, not to the men who footed the bill for his creation and continued to support the initiative. Steve tamps down the part of him that riles up sick when Jeremiah had mentioned _special,_ because it felt that going there would be an even bigger can of worms than he wanted to open right now. “Earlier, when we were still on the plane, you said that Beta-38 and 37 weren’t like you. Is that related to what you meant by ‘model’?”

There’s a minute nod against Steve’s jaw. “They were born complete, and only had to grow up. I had the framework, but needed to have installations.”

“Did you know why you were…” Steve pauses, detesting his next choice of words. There’s no way around them that he can figure out right now. “…designed so differently from the ones before?”

“My brothers were made as a test pair to see if the doctors could bypass the issues that usually happened with integration, to be compared with me and—“ Jeremiah cuts off, sharply. It’s just a few seconds where Steve can hear Jeremiah working his throat to speak, but then Jeremiah resumes talking as if something hadn’t come up to cripple him at all. “B-besides that, we were exactly the same.” 

He looks up at Steve, like wants to know if he’s saying the right thing; his face is so open, and yet so shy. It entirely belies the terrible nature of what Steve’s hearing. “We were made to the same Standard, but there weren’t any more like them because the testing was not favorable. Their reaction times were different. Mechanical problems for their parts couldn’t be fixed as easily, so when Beta-36 broke, he broke forever, and was decommissioned. Beta-37 and Beta-38 were stronger than me at first, but then I got stronger than them because I could heal and be repaired a lot faster. The doctors said that they were more durable than me, but I was cleverer and could pass for human a lot better.”

Pass, for _human?_ Steve’s blood runs suddenly runs cold, and his spine goes to ice before the heat of vicious, protective fury surges up to melt the horror away from him into a familiar, deep-set hatred. “You _are_ human,” Steve firmly asserts, seeking to comfort himself as much as Jeremiah. “You’re as human as I am.”

Oddly, Jeremiah pulls back and scrutinizes Steve’s face with an expression upon his own that reminds Steve of the way that Bucky always got, when they got a hold of a pack of cards and climbed out of Steve’s kitchen window to gingerly balance them over open schoolbooks flipped page-down on their knees, lest the cards slip through the grating into the thick humidity of summertime evenings in Brooklyn. Jeremiah’s lips are pursed up and his nose has half of a wrinkle—the arrangement only lasts a brief second before it gets schooled out into the careful blankness Steve recognizes from when they had first met.

Someone lying dead in that base had at least given Jeremiah enough freedom to be a child that his default reaction to an emotional stress was to falsify impassiveness rather than vivacity—but that would mean that Jeremiah had been hurt enough times for that to have become a habit in the first place. Steve is almost as relieved as he is murderous. Hatefully, shamefully, he wants to squeeze the ones responsible until something pops, turned to pulp sliding over his hands; until the smell of viscera and offal goes so far up his nose and down his throat that the timelessness of death makes everything blur together into a moment where he could just turn around and wipe his hands on the snow, turn around and have Bucky’s pale hand come up to wipe the blood off of his mouth, turn around and shout to Dum-Dum and the others that he’d chased down the last enemy soldier, turn around and head to the rendezvous point where they’d meet up with Howard’s transport and radio a brief report to Peggy. Like a bad dream, like nightmare, worse than that. Like he could close his eyes in the hideousness of it all and then wake up someplace where he could still go home.

Jeremiah can’t seem to maintain his expressionless face; to be frank, he looks quite upset—his next words slip out of his mouth to shatter the silence of the room, uttered unevenly to clutter the space between mystery and truth with dismay.

“You’re not human,” Jeremiah jaggedly blurts. His lower lip is wobbling, and there’s a little wrinkle on his forehead that he’s much too young to have. Steve’s vaguely aware of the blood draining out from his own face. “You, you’re not human.”

“I—“

“You’re different, you were changed, like, like _Alpha._ ”

Steve inhales, sharply. “What do you mean?”

Jeremiah snubs him and makes to wriggle around in Steve’s hold to extend his arms out for somebody else. “You’re not human,” he repeats. “You’re different.”

It’s a struggle to maintain his grip on Jeremiah when the boy starts to struggle in earnest. The flailing is directionless, benign, but then an impossibly hard elbow smacks Steve in the teeth and splits his upper lip—Sam hisses and quickly steps forward to take Jeremiah out of Steve’s arms. “Shhh, hey, _hey_. Stop that, right now.”

Jeremiah settles against Sam’s chest and stares at Steve, sullenly weepy. “You’re not human. You’re different, but I’m more different than you are.” He resolutely looks away and refuses to say anything more. Sam looks at Steve, and Steve looks at Sam, and at everyone frozen in the room.

“Jeremy?”

There’s no response save for an upset sound muffled into Sam’s shirt, and after several tense minutes of Jeremiah ignoring Steve as thoroughly as possible, Natasha clears her throat and says, “Hmm, maybe it’s time we all took up that offer of the tasteless lounge. Steve, you know where decontamination is?”

“I’ll, I’ll find it,” Steve croaks. There’s blood running down his chin, and he wipes at it, thoughtlessly. A shadow of Bucky’s hand cups his jaw, runs down Steve’s skin to rest over the swell of his throat. It flickers and flickers and flickers in an afterimage, in a memory that he tears away from in a familiar rush of loneliness, guilt, and fear. He turns to leave before he does something stupid, like reach for Jeremiah and search again for a pulse, a heartbeat.

He’s two hallways away before he realizes he’s forgotten to grab a change of civilian clothes, but keeps walking. Turns out, he doesn’t have to worry; while Steve’s opening the door to the showers, he hears Sam jog up behind him with their shared duffel bag thrown over one shoulder. “Figured it wasn’t a good idea to leave you all by your lonesome.”

“Is Jere—“

“He’s fine. I got the little guy distracted by a Rubik’s cube; I think he was probably almost finished with it by the time I managed to get out the door.” Sam reaches up and holds Steve’s chin gently in one hand, turning Steve’s face from side-to-side before he sighs heavily at the already-fading pink line where the split lip had been. “You better let me get a look at the rest of you, yeah?”

Steve’s not really up to speaking coherently at the moment. He’s tired, but submits to Sam’s careful touches. Sam’s warm, and it feels, it feels nice to be touched like this. “W-wow. Really? About the cube.”

Sam smiles lopsidedly, dropping his hands to cross his arms. There’s a tilt to his head that can only be taken as fond—Steve thinks that Natasha’s quirks tend to rub off after extended contact. They’re not tells. She and Clint had spent several months in 2012 beating most of Steve’s subconscious mannerisms out of him, the end result being that Steve knows all too well what it means when every movement you make must be deliberate, calculated. He’s still shit at it even if he used to be on the silver screen, and it seems that Sam is, too. 

“Yes, really. C’mon, let’s wash up. Clint told me that Jer-Bear was cleared for a scrub, so he’ll take him in after us.”

Inside the decontamination room, there’s a set of bins for dirtied clothing, lined with thick bags to wrap them up. There’s a set of stalls for heavy-duty rinsing, equipped with doors and hoses and what looks like individually-wrapped sets of coarse scrubbers and thick, syrupy antiseptic soap. Beyond that, there’s a shower room that’s closer to what Steve’s used to; a row of exposed showerheads set high above white, ceramic-tiled floors with inset grates. There’s a long metal bench in the middle of the room that runs parallel to the wall opposite to the showers, with empty storage cubbies built into the concrete beneath a mirror that extends to either edge of the room. 

Steve strips mechanically and steps into a stall, dumping all of his filthy gear into a bin and forgoing the plastic-wrapped disposable slippers provided for his convenience. He reads the extensive decontamination procedure on the inside of the sealed door and sighs heavily. He’s had enough of scrubbing off his top three layers of skin after a mission, but he’s covered in dried gore, and needs it something awful. 

He can hear Sam in the next stall over release a squawk of alarm before the humming of the multiple showerheads overwhelms the sound of his voice. 

“Get used to it!” Steve shouts, starting up his own routine. He may or may not get a shout of asshole in return, but the thought of it is enough to make him chuckle as he rests his forehead on the cool surface of the stainless steel walls. The water pounding the blood from his skin is hot, percussive. It’s easy to drift away from his troubles in the rhythm; it’s easy to drift away from anything, everything. It’s nothing like drowning, but it doesn’t prevent him from drowning in thought.

Human. Is he human? 

Thinking about it, Steve isn’t sure. Does it matter? He’s always been just a kid from Brooklyn—is it accurate to think of himself a _kid_ anymore? He still feels like one, sort of—but somewhere in there, he’d also become a piece of war propaganda, an actor, a soldier, a freak of science. So it’s not the whole truth if he describes himself _just_ as a kid, if only because he’d become so much more than that. It was after Fort Lehigh that Steve stopped being just a kid, maybe, no matter what how he said otherwise.

But that end result was a product of Abraham Erskine’s serum and Howard Stark’s fantastical Vita-Ray machine.

Howard’s contraption was less of a machine and more of a coffin, perhaps. When Steve’s bones had melted and reformed longer and stronger, when his skin burst at the seams and he had briefly seen the lurid strips of muscular fabric bulging from his body before fresh skin had grown over, Steve sure didn’t feel like the wheezy asthmatic he’d been up to that moment. Instead, he was pretty sure he was dying. He didn’t, clearly, but a part of him wonders if he’d left something behind in Brooklyn, that day, besides his numerous ailments.

His body had ripped itself apart and became like new too quickly for blood to coat the inside of the machine. The parts of his body that were in contact with the fabric of his trousers and the leather of the bed burned worse than fire, Steve being rent raw against the non-organics until the serum had redirected its efforts away from fusing Steve’s body into what entrapped it and towards building itself a new skeletal scaffold to hold up all the new muscle. There had been a moment where Steve had gone deaf and blind, the proportions of his skull changing to accommodate a larger brain and stronger jaw. His vision had quickly returned, but all he’d been able to see was the dim light coming in from the little window in the door—it hadn’t looked any different from before, so blurred was his sight from the agony. He’d been clenching his teeth so hard the pressure in his head prevented him from hearing anything besides the rush of his own blood to know whether or not his hearing was back all the way.

The pain departed from him in a mirrored form from how it had come; a vise about him, releasing into a caress, then a promise.

Then nothing.

The capsule had opened, and he’d been released, slick from sweat and soft with the indistinct edge of relief from excruciating, unmentionable suffering. He’d been golden, golden in the eyes of the nurses who had surrounded him, golden under the disbelieving and ecstatic hands of Howard and Erskine, golden as a newborn chick but not even half-a-breath as fragile. Peggy—he doesn’t even have to think about the moment in full to remember the feather-touch flash of her hand upon his bare chest. His first thought was that she’d shrunk, but as he’d breathed more air in one heaving gulp than he’d ever breathed in his whole life, he had come to realize that couldn’t be true. Someone like her, someone incredible like her—she could never be diminished.

Steve had instead become a supersoldier, a success emerged from the shell of one who had been so small, so sickly. He had ceased to be a man, in terms of who he had been, in the prior shape he had worn to limp through the streets. 

He had found it to be profoundly strange when he was fitted for his new clothes, and he found it stranger still to go back to his old apartment and crouch to get through the doorway and sleep in his old bed, which creaked perilously beneath him in the way that it only had before on those occasions when Bucky had been snowed in while visiting and tucked up together with Steve on the ratty mattress for warmth. It was only for a handful of nights, while Steve remained caught in the limbo between his transformation and his first auditions with the USO troupe. 

If he turned his head to the side, into his pillow, he could block out the stench of the trash coming up from the alley outside his window; he could imagine, with the sensitivity of his newly-enhanced nose, that he could smell the faint traces of Bucky’s pomade and cologne from months and months ago.

The scent, when he had wrapped the whispers of it around him, felt as if it wasn’t his to cradle close; it belonged instead to the dusty, ashy, menthol-and-charcoal ghost which lingered in the coarse weave of the bedsheets and in the back collar of that too-small coat jacket and in the narrow, smudgy fingerprints at the edges a daily paper from last month. The apartment was no longer _his_ —or rather, he had become an intruder in the residence of a young man who was never coming back to occupy a space which had shrunk to accommodate a spindly frame that no longer existed.

So perhaps, Steve was only too glad to pack away his new things, and shut away the old. The key, he remembers, he’d slipped in an envelope and put in the mail after he’d locked the door for what he didn’t know would be the last time. 

_To Becca,_ he’d wrote. _I hope you’re well. I’ll be going away for a bit. I won’t be far, and it shouldn’t be long, and if I remember I’ll write you. I’ve got this new job for the war effort, so I won’t be home. It’ll be good to do some good, like Buck is overseas. I’ll work hard. I’d tell you not to worry about me, but you’re as much my sister as anyone could be, so I know you will. I’m not sure about the exact day I’ll be home, but here’s the key to my place, with all my things inside. If something doesn’t turn out, save it all for Buck, please? When he comes home. I know I haven’t been to visit your Ma or Pa or anybody for a while, but I promise that I’ll come see you when the war’s over._

_Love, Steve._

He hadn’t realized he would become so different, or feel so differently, or feel so at odds with the little void that was left behind in his old spaces, but so, it made his new life true to the name of the project that had remade him. Steve had been reborn—but rebirth implies that there’s a good ol’ death in there, somewhere. 

Was Jeremiah correct to accuse him of being some creature other than human? Steve knows that he’s no longer of the same sort as Clint or Sam, but he had originally been cut of the same cloth; as same as you could get, he supposes.

He was born first as a human. He was born second as a soldier. Did awakening in the future count as another rebirth? He doesn’t register that the water’s been off for a while until Sam raps on his door. “Sorry—lost track of time,” he calls out. 

Steve picks up the scrubber and the soap. He’d forgotten to actually wash himself while he’d been thinking, so he turns the knobs to run the procedure again. Maybe if he increases the water pressure, it’ll do a better job of knocking him out of the past and back where he’s supposed to be.

As a result, by the time he leaves the stall, he’s tender and bright pink all over. Sam’s naked in the shower room and toweling himself off after a more leisurely rinse. “Hey,” Sam says, noticing how Steve’s stepping gingerly onto the tiles. “Somebody looks like an eraser.”

It takes a while for the comment to sink in, and a little bit longer to connect the dots for the requisite information. “Like…a Pink Pearl?” Steve’s pretty sure he’s got that one right; his mind processes the written word so rapidly that Steve can’t help but read every slip of paper that gets into his hands or every sign he passes by. Pink Pearl. He’s seen that brand of eraser listed on nearly every back-to-school supply list he’s seen in the supermarkets.

Sam gently gestures Steve over to one of the showerheads and turns on the water for him, testing the temperature until it settles on something relatively chilly. “Yep. Although I have to say, no white dude I’ve ever seen has had as much of a painful, pearly shine as you do now outside of a burn victim. Get under here, you need to cool off fierce.”

The all-purpose soap in the dispenser on the wall is pleasantly mild, and helps to soothe the sting on his skin. Sam moves off to sit on the bench and get dressed; Steve’s aware he’s being watched, but it’s neither assessing nor appreciative. It piques his curiosity. “Something on my back, Sam?”

“Nah. Just thinking how much it must hurt to sit down on an ass that small. How come I’ve never seen you put a cushion down on your chairs?”

The sudden burst of laughter from nowhere startles Steve, until he realizes it’s coming from him. “Maybe chairs are just a hell of a lot more comfortable in the future,” he snickers. “When I was, was all bones, I’d lean on tables or walls to avoid sitting down, but then my feet would get tired and I’d have to sit down anyway. Always had to choose between two discomforts.”

Sam’s quiet, pensive. There are a few beads of water shining like gems amidst the dense darkness of his hair. “You’ve never said anything about it before, but how’d you spend your time?”

Steve’s had a lot of interviews about how things were _back in the day,_ for documentaries and talk shows and nosy, nosy people. Somehow, it doesn’t come across as invasive, not when it’s from Sam. He even forgets to use past tense. “Working. Looking for work. Being sick. Hungry. Sick again. Drinking, sometimes. Drawing.” He shrugs, turns off the water. He’s half-erect from the cold, but doesn’t make an effort to cover himself while he pads over to the bench and their shared duffel for his clean clothes.

They’re both military, after all. They’ve seen worse than just another cock in the showers, and besides. Sam’s been by his side since the mess with SHIELD, months ago. When it comes to Steve’s body, there’s not much that Sam hasn’t already seen. Sam gives a lighthearted, meaningless whistle at Steve’s approach, but his gaze doesn’t linger and he hands Steve a towel. “There’s lotion,” he offers. “For the sting.”

“That’s kind of them,” Steve replies. “I won’t need it.” Sam’s wearing a t-shirt and jeans, with sneakers. After a quick inspection of Steve’s bumps and bruises—Sam huffs at the peeling edges of the waterproof bandage the other medics had slapped onto Steve's shoulder and replaces it with a new one from the kit in their duffel—Steve tugs on much of the same, but throws a zip hoodie on top. It’s more casual than he prefers, but who cares about preferences right now? The cold shower was refreshing, but he’s had enough of icy water to last several lifetimes, thanks.

The walk back to the lab is soundless save for the faint squeaking of their shoes on the glossy floors. Sam’s the one who speaks first, turning his face to look at Steve with his lips set in a firm line. “Hey. Before we get back, I just want to clear something up.”

It sounds pretty ominous, and Steve slows to a stop, apprehensively turning to face Sam on full. “What is it?” 

“You’re human. Captain America might not be, but Steve Rogers? Human.” 

The immediate, shocking relief the words provide leave Steve stunned. Shy, Steve eventually stutters out a laugh. “What about Cap? If he’s not human, then what’s he?”

“An inspiration,” Sam says, immediately. “A good man, maybe a little too good to be real.” He reaches out, gives Steve a bit of a squeeze on the elbow. “Sure feels real. Ok, sure, Cap’s human, too.”

Steve ducks his head, abashed. He’s alive. He’s real. Maybe that just has to be good enough. “Do you think Jeremiah’s human? He was adamant about being…not human. Being something beyond it, like me.”

“There’s nobody quite like you, Steve.” Sam crosses his arms. He exhales. “I’d think that a part of Jeremiah’s perception of himself is due to the fact that the _only_ input about who or what he was, before us, was from people who never really viewed him as a child to begin with. I’d think that he trusts us. He trusts _you,_ and it could be that he thought you were lying to him.”

“I wouldn’t—!”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t. But the kid knows enough about himself to figure that he’s not like the rest of us, y’know? He’s only been told that he’s not like the rest of us. Maybe he expected you to support what he thought was fact, and you say something that he’s been taught to think is outrageous.” Sam flings a hand into the air. “Hell, it’s not easy to go through life when you’re surrounded by folks who keep telling you you’re something other than what you know you are, who you try to be.”

Steve looks up, meets Sam’s eyes. “Or when you’re in an environment where you start to believe all that bullshit because it’s all you’ve ever had.”

Sam softens, and the expression makes the whole underground facility seem marginally warmer because of it. “Yeah. You know what that’s like. Maybe in a different way, but it bites pretty hard all the same.”

“I do.”

“Well, good. Guess we’ve got to convince Jeremy that he’s somebody, not a something. You up for it?” Their shoulders brush together when they start walking again, Steve having stepped closer to Sam. Sam’s warm, and smells like that soothing lotion that Steve declined to use. Lavender. It’s nice.

It’s nice enough that when Steve laughs _again,_ it feels more real. _He_ feels more real. “Is that supposed to be a rhetorical question?”

“Is it?”

“Nah.” Steve flushes. He’s not sure why. “I’m up for it.” It comes out more muted than he expected.

Sam shoots him a look as they open the door, lightly teasing. “Say it again, huh? Didn’t hear you the first time.”

“I’m up for it!”

“What was that, a mouse?”

Steve’s halfway through a shout when Fury fixes him with a glare and steps forward to shove a box into his arms. “Disturbing the peace, Rogers.”

“Pardon, but I was boosting morale, sir,” Sam interjects, moving into the room to pick up a box of his own. Most of the files have been already moved to the other room, and Natasha is nowhere to be seen. 

Jeremiah is swinging his legs off the edge of the table, still swaddled up. Even with the blanket wrapped around Jeremiah’s shoulders, Steve can tell that the skin’s returned to Jeremiah’s right arm, and that the left now has skin extending to the elbow. Jeremiah’s fiddling with an interactive hologram that currently displays the inner workings of a giraffe—as Steve watches, the animal’s transparent heart pulses to a silent beat and the skeleton moves through a preordained series of steps while the stomach churns through digesting vegetation and the tail flicks tiny glowing pinpricks of electronic flies away from the virtual safari. The hologram must have been something Clint picked up in London; Clint himself is sifting through the bags for a post-scrub outfit.

Jeremiah looks up when Steve enters, but averts his gaze. He doesn’t seem upset anymore—just tentative and almost frightened. The box in Steve’s arms gets set down on the other side of the cleared table, and Steve kneels on the floor.

“Jeremiah?” he begins, quietly. “Am I human?”

No response. The giraffe pivots around with a sweep of Jeremiah’s small hand. “No,” he eventually replies. 

“I _think_ that I’m human. I feel like that makes me one.”

Jeremiah frowns, all dark. He switches out the giraffe to a crocodile eating a water buffalo, and mutters in exasperation. “Not human.”

Steve shrugs. “Ok. I’m not human, but I _am_ Steve. What does that make you?”

“Bet—Jeremiah.”

“Is ‘Jeremiah’ a _what,_ or a _who?_ ”

Steve thinks for a moment that he’s accidentally broken Bucky’s strange, odd little clone. Jeremiah just stares at him in incomprehension. “’Jeremiah’ is a _who_ name, isn’t it? That makes you a _who._ ”

“A _who?_ ”

“Yes. A _who_ is a person.”

“Not human.”

“A _person._ ”

“Am I a person?” The question makes Steve pause. He could argue that JARVIS, Stark’s AI, is possessed of personhood. Personhood itself, its constituents…is that equivalent with humanity? Or were they two separate things? All Steve can figure is that he was never meant to be a philosopher. Bucky was the one who looked forward to the future, who kept checking out speculative novels from the library for Steve instead of the war histories, because _Jesus, Joseph and Mary, Steve, you got to stop looking back at all the dead folks. The future’s made by the living._

Personhood. It’s a start. 

“Yeah. You’re a person.”

Jeremiah beams, but Clint swoops in to pick him up before Steve can. “Hang on, you’re _filthy._ We need to wash up before you can cuddle with Papa Rogers.”

Steve opens his mouth. Closes his mouth. Opens it again. “ _Papa—?_ ”

“That’s right, Daddy-o,” Natasha says, having reappeared from nowhere. She hands Steve back his box with a smile. She’s wearing different clothes and smells like that lavender lotion, her hair still damp. “Help Auntie move this stuff over to the archival room. We’ve got cots set up for later.”

Faced with Steve’s hot embarrassment, Sam and Natasha tease him relentlessly while they finish moving the rest of the materials over. It’s terrible. Natasha actually manages to pull a dusty _#1 DAD_ mug out of some drawer in some room and fills it with stale candy from a bag that she’d pilfered from some poor British agent’s desk. “You stole this,” Steve accuses, but Natasha simply blows him a kiss and steals back a wrapped lemon drop from the mug in Steve’s hand. 

She hands Sam a sweet, too. “I borrowed it. Don’t break it with your big meaty man paws, we’re returning it.” Steve concedes and takes some for himself. They taste distinctly starchy.

By the time Clint returns with Jeremiah, they’ve managed to get all the paperwork set out again, and are trying to set up some monitors to view all of the recorded material on the floppy discs and CDs. The technicians have since been dismissed until tomorrow; things are winding down now that the fatigue is catching up on them. Fortunately, the new material they’d seized from the base is now roughly organized, and Natasha’s already compiled a list with for priority files. 

Meanwhile, it’s already developing into a habit for Steve to nestle Jeremiah in his arms—Jeremiah’s hair is soft with cleanliness and Clint’s tied it back with a hideous lacy bow. It would be uglier on its own, but on Jeremiah, it ends up being rather charming. The archival room is warmer than the cryolab by far, but Clint’s exchanged the ugly blanket for a new dark blue canvas jacket, with quilted padding on the inside for insulation and a fleece-lined hood. The color against Jeremiah’s pale skin and eyes makes Steve’s heart thud painfully up his throat, but. It suits him, and Jeremiah likes the amount of give that it has—so it can stay. 

None of them actually want to get back to work. They’ve washed the grime off of their skins and the thought of sinking under into it all again, albeit in black and white, is a task too exhausting for the current moment. Steve’s shield has been wiped down by somebody and propped up against a table leg. Fury lies down on the saggy couch to nap, and a starry-eyed aide appears with sandwiches that Clint had apparently called in to be delivered.

There are too many sandwiches. Steve eats most of them. Jeremiah eats almost-the-most, but seems dissatisfied. He ends up gnawing on a shiny space pen that Clint had pickpocketed off of someone. So long as he doesn’t _eat_ it, it’s fine, right?

Ultimately, they all end up stretched out on the floor in various states of repose instead of turning the projector on; the only person who actually takes a cot is Natasha. Sam settles in to sleep leaning back against a wall, one of his ankles reassuringly crossed with Steve’s. Clint sits by the door, for first watch.

Trusting and comfortable, Jeremiah sprawls out on his stomach across Steve’s lap, the pen in his mouth and his hands occupied with a brand-new Bucky Bear. The tag’s still on it, dangling irritatingly in Steve’s line of sight. He leans forward to snip it off with his teeth; as he does so, his palm shifts on Jeremiah’s back and Steve freezes.

It’s odd. He wouldn’t have—he wouldn’t have expected to feel a heartbeat, not when he knows there’s a layer of biosynthetic skin covering a metallic exoskeleton to insulate the roiling of Jeremiah’s bodily rhythms from the outside world. Steve hadn’t been able to find it before.

But, it’s really there, and Jeremiah swivels his head to look up at Steve, curious as to why Steve’s started trembling. 

“You’re alive.”

Jeremiah frowns that Bucky frown, the silly squished one with the pursed lips and wrinkly nose. “Yes,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I am alive.” He sits up, tucks his head under Steve’s chin, and curls in to sleep. “You’re alive, too.”

Alive. Jeremiah’s alive, and even if Bucky isn’t, Steve _is_. 

It might have felt like the end of the world. Maybe it was the end of the old one. Steve’s been through a lot of worlds by that reasoning, but there’s something about this current one that makes him want to fight harder for it. It feels more like a second chance than the others, and none of them had ever counted so much.

“We are, aren’t we,” he murmurs, stroking his hand down Jeremiah’s back. Now that he knows where the heartbeat is centered, it’s not hard to find it again. It’s a strong heartbeat, a good one. It’s promising. With a heartbeat like this, the looming obstacles of Jeremiah’s legality and Steve’s guardianship seem just a little bit less dark. “We’re alive.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This monster chapter is nearly 24k, effectively doubling the current length of this fic. There are downsides to splitting up chapters into little chunks in your rough draft, because when each individual chunk ends up getting longer and longer...and when your final draft edits involve a lot of shuffling and rewriting and brand-new material, well. 
> 
> Anyway: I realize that this fic is very detail-heavy. That's Steve's fault for being maudlin as all hell, and it's my fault for working from the POV of a character with a superhuman, extremely observant and constantly-thinking mind. Whoops. 
> 
> Aside 2, the next bit, isn't too long! But it might be a while before I can post it due to a series of very critical looming deadlines in my academic career (grad school). Until then, sit tight. Thanks so much, guys. Come talk to me on [tumblr](http://requiodile.tumblr.com/).


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